Transcript Reading different writing systems: The grapholinguistic equilibrium hypothesis Mark S. Seidenberg University of Wisconsin-Madison Golden era for reading research! Not just English; many writing systems, languages Lots.

Reading different writing systems:
The grapholinguistic equilibrium
hypothesis
Mark S. Seidenberg
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Golden era for reading research!
Not just English; many writing systems, languages
Lots of progress!
One of the big success stories in cognitive science/neurosci
(links to education: not so good, at least in US)
My own work
Brain circuits
Research at UW, Medical
College of Wisconsin,
Haskins Labs (CT)
Computational models
Connectionist models that
simulate detailed aspects of
acquisition, skilled performance.
Dyslexia = anomalies in how
system develops
Behavior
Children, adults
Normal, dyslexic
English, Serbian, Chinese,
other writing systems
For today’s talk, I tried to pick a topic that is of interest to this aud
Writing Systems and Reading
• Do properties of writing systems affect
–
–
–
–
Skilled reading
Learning to read
Brain circuits that support reading
Dyslexia
We have this framework….
context
meaning
spelling
sound
1. Mappings between codes are statistical, not
categorical
2. Ouput determined by multiple constraints
3. Division of labor among components varies
between writing systems
between individuals
Other models?
There are some.
Not the time or place to do comparisons.
But, DRC
Doesn’t Read Correctly
And CDP+
Can’d Do Pronunciation, and other stuff
Post-hoc fitting of models to data.
Only allows models to fit individual studies of a phenomenon, s
“incremental, nested”? No, not actually.
But that’s a different talk
Impact of writing systems: an area
where dual-route models have little
to say
• Fitting models to writing systems/languages
• Each gets a different model, different
parameters
• Similarities/differences built in: have to know
them already
• No learning
• No semantics
• No “why”
But that’s a different talk
It’s a golden era for reading research but it’s
taken a while for cross-linguistic issues to come
into focus
Most research: it’s about the properties of writing
systems
Orthographic depth
I don’t think this is quite right.
It’s about writing systems and the languages they
represent
There are tradeoffs between writing systems and
languages
There is Grapholinguistic Equilibrium
Confidential:
I don’t actually know how every writing system in the world
For example, I don’t know
český jazyk
Grapholinguistic Equilibrium is a hypothesis.
Most of the evidence is circumstantial.
Not much direct experimental evidence.
Let’s do an experiment here! Now!
When you hearthi
s
Ask: is it true of český jazyk?
If it is, great.
If it isn’t, I’ll go
So:
semantics
orthography
phonology
Writing affords routes to meaning!
ALL writing
Whether your word is
or
or
PICTURE
obrázek
An early division of labor theory:
Orthographic Depth
semantics
orthography
phonology
Orthographic depth hypothesis:
shallow:
more orth-phon-sem
deep:
more orth-sem
English:
both
1980s
Katz, Turvey,
Haskins Labs
Among alphabetic writing systems, English is unusual
many inconsistencies
unlike Finnish, Italian, Russian, Korean,
Czech
others
orth-->phon is a big issue for English learners
not for everyone else
We don’t want theories of reading to be based on the outlier data
It’s true that written English differs from shallower alphabetic sy
Assumptions derived from English may not be valid.
Findings differ in important respects.
But, there are no “outlier” orthographies. Just:
Different tradeoffs between writing systems and languages
Is English an outlier?
For example, Learning to read: are shallow orthographies e
Case study: Welsh vs. English
• Welsh: shallow
English: deep
• Different schools, same communities
• Natural controls for SES etc.
(These are older studies, Marketa.)
Ellis & Hooper, 2001: Welsh-reading 7 year olds correctly
name twice as many words as English readers
Percent Correctly
Pronounced
Spencer & Hanley, 2003: 6 year olds
100
90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
Out of 30 items/
condition
Welsh
English
Words
Nonwords
Similar findings in other languages
Italian
Spanish
German
French
Finnish
Serbian
Turkish
Albanian
others
Handbook of Orthography and Literacy,
Joshi & Aron (Eds.), Erlbaum 2006
Seymour et al. (2003)
Ziegler et al. (2010)
Czech?
Issue:
These studies equate “reading” with “reading aloud”
Question:
What is the relationship between
reading aloud and comprehension?
Not tested or not tested in detail.
The word “comprehension” does not occur in this article.
Why not?
1. Many studies of English show that learning orth-phon is
hard
Reading aloud is related to comprehension skill
2. Therefore, writing systems that make it easier to learn
orth-phon should be easier to learn to read = comprehend
Case where thinking was too tied to studies of English.
But Reading Aloud ≠ Reading
I shall demonstrate…
1. Dissociations of reading aloud and
comprehension
Good reading aloud
Zero comprehension
Bar Mitzvah Languages
For the Bar/Bat Mitzvah, the boy/girl
•
•
•
•
Must be able to read Hebrew aloud
Do not have to comprehend
Can be done if the writing system is shallow
Which vowelled Hebrew is.
Welsh: also a very good Bar Mitzvah language!
Do Shallow Orthographies Promote
Better Comprehension?
Not in the Welsh-English studies
Ellis and Hooper
Pronunciation
Welsh > English
Comprehension
English > Welsh*
Hanley et al.
Comprehension
English > Welsh
Correlation between pronunciation, comprehension:
English
highly significant
Welsh
n.s.
“This result suggests that a transparent orthography
does not confer any advantages as far as reading
comprehension is concerned. As comprehension is
clearly the goal of reading this finding is potentially
reassuring for teachers of English.”
Hanley et al. 2004
What about other Bar Mitzvah
Languages?
Turkish: Aydin Durgunoğlu has looked at both reading
aloud and comprehension in detail
“Phonological awareness and decoding develop rapidly in both
young and adult readers of Turkish because of the transparent
orthography and the special characteristics of phonology and
morphology. However, reading comprehension is still a problem.”
Durgunoğlu, 2006
Also true of other shallow
orthographies?
Czech?
2. People comprehend words they cannot
pronounce correctly
English speakers all have (or had) words of this
sort in our vocabularies.
Egregious
Piquant
Suave
Rapport
Quay
Non-pareil
Automata
Chaos
Coitus
URANUS
“URINE-OUS?”
If we tested my reading aloud, I might perform
more poorly than Welsh readers too.
3. How shallow are shallow orthographies?
Writing systems are not transcriptions of speech.
Information relevant to pronunciation is left out.
Creates limit on strictly orth-phon-sem processing.
Example: Serbo-Croatian, the original “shallow” orthography
Grapheme-phoneme correspondences easy, but not
sufficient
Pronunciation requires more
syllabic stress:
pitch accent:
ZATvori
prisons
RIBA fish vs. to scrub
zatVORi
to shut
LUK
onion vs. arch
PROIZvodi
proizVODi
products
to produce
A lot like English!
CONduct
conDUCT
Czech?
4. What prevents people from learning orth->sem?
Even in shallow orthographies?
Harm & Seidenberg (2004) division of labor model learned
Orth-phon-sem
Orth-sem
At the same time.
Maybe people do too.
5. If shallow is so GREAT, what about Hebrew?
It’s shallow all right…
… but they leave out the vowels!
6. And what about the spoken
language?
• Writing systems differ
• So do the languages they represent
Comprehension depends on both!
Gough, Simple view of reading
Decoding X Spoken language comprehension
Orthographic depth
Morphological complexity
DEEPER
Morphologically simple
SHALLOWER
Morphologically complex
English, Chinese
Finnish, Serbian, Italian, Russian
Albanian, Welsh, Spanish, etc.
Czech?
Why would this relation hold, in general?
Consider Serbo-Croatian
• They get the spelling-sound correspondences
for free
• But the morphology is very complex!
3 genders
masc
fem
neuter
Czech
2 numbers
sing
plural
7 cases
nominative
genitive
dative
accusative
instrumental
locative
vocative
Mirkovic, Seidenberg, Joanisse (Cognitive Science,
2011)
Model of learning Serbian inflectional system
Now: imagine learning to read Serbian if, as in English,
many letters had multiple pronunciations
A few consonants like C and G
Each vowel represents many sounds
This additional level of complexity would make the system
vastly more difficult to learn.
Too hard!
Contrast: Learning to read in English
•
•
NOT: one spelling - one sound
–
But, irregulars are mostly short, high-frequency words
–
And not arbitrary: HAVE is not “glorp”
The inflectional system is trivial
–
Number on nouns, tense and number on verbs
–
Makes words shorter too
Grapholinguistic Equilibrium
The simple view of writing systems and reading:
G = orth opacity x linguistic complexity)
English: high opacity, low complexity
Serbian: low opacity, high complexity
Languages/writing systems tend to keep G constant.
In other words
Languages get the writing systems they
deserve
(why English spelling reform is pointless)
Even more broadly
Writing systems provide cues about sound and meaning
Late Hieroglyphics
Hememu = “humanity”
Sound cues
sound
meaning
+
Meaning cues
(man, woman, many)
Chinese
“Mother”
Semantic cue
“radical”
Sound cue
“phonetic”
In Hebrew and Arabic
K-T-B
In English
Redhea
d
Blockhea
d
Deadheads
Morphemes = convergence of sound and meaning
In Serbo-Croatian
all related to “advisor”
Lemmas = strong semantic cues
In Czech
Conclusions
• Most comparative research on reading has focused on reading
aloud
– definitely easier in shallow orthographies
• However, comprehension depends on knowledge of spoken
language
• Spoken languages vary in “morphological depth” and other ways
• Tradeoffs between properties of writing systems and languages
= grapholinguistic equilibrium
• Writing systems are codes for conveying sound + meaning,
universally.
context
meaning
spelling
sound
Thanks for listening!
Are Some Writing Systems Easier to
Learn to Read?
We won’t know without taking into account properties of spoken
language
But it doesn’t look like it.
Every theory/model must have these basic elements
But, additional assumptions:
• Each code is
learned,constrained by
other codes;
context
meaning
spelling
sound
• Interactivity, not modularity;
• Information encoded by
collections of units, etc.
Not specific to reading.
What is different about
“dual-route” models (e.g.,
DRC, CDP+):
But, for what?
Also:
Models don’t address computation of meaning!
In the US there are many people who are poor at
pronouncing words and nonwords aloud:
Millions of readers taught by Whole
Language Method!
X
No no no!
“Dual-route” models are different!!!
Two routes to phonology
Lexical route
phonology
orthography
Nonlexical route
Not about computing meaning!
Other talk!
University of Wisconsin-Madison
A birthplace of American psychology
(1886)
NRC rankings, 2010
DRC
̬