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The Effect of Orthographic Transparency on Auditory Word Recognition Across the Development of Reading Proficiency

A question under debate in psycholinguistics is the nature of the relationship between spoken and written languages. Although it has been extensively shown that orthographic transparency, which varies across writing systems, strongly affects reading performance, its role in speech processing is much...

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Autores principales: Bakhtiar, Mehdi, Mokhlesin, Maryam, Pattamadilok, Chotiga, Politzer-Ahles, Stephen, Zhang, Caicai
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8353368/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34385960
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.691989
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author Bakhtiar, Mehdi
Mokhlesin, Maryam
Pattamadilok, Chotiga
Politzer-Ahles, Stephen
Zhang, Caicai
author_facet Bakhtiar, Mehdi
Mokhlesin, Maryam
Pattamadilok, Chotiga
Politzer-Ahles, Stephen
Zhang, Caicai
author_sort Bakhtiar, Mehdi
collection PubMed
description A question under debate in psycholinguistics is the nature of the relationship between spoken and written languages. Although it has been extensively shown that orthographic transparency, which varies across writing systems, strongly affects reading performance, its role in speech processing is much less investigated. The present study addressed this issue in Persian, whose writing system provides a possibility to assess the impact of orthographic transparency on spoken word recognition in young children at different stages of reading acquisition. In Persian, the long vowels are systematically present in the script, whereas the spelling correspondence of short vowels is progressively omitted from the script in the course of reading acquisition, thus, turning transparent into opaque spelling. Based on this unique characteristic, we tested 144 monolingual Persian-speaking nonreaders (i.e., preschoolers) and readers (second graders to fifth graders and young adults) in an auditory lexical decision task using transparent and opaque words. Overall, the results showed that, in accordance with the fact that the diacritics of short vowels are progressively omitted during the second year of schooling, the stimuli containing short vowels (opaque words) were recognized more slowly than transparent ones in third graders. Interestingly, there is a hint that the emergence of the transparency effect in the third graders was associated with an overall slower recognition speed in this group compared to their younger peers. These findings indicate that learning opaque spelling-sound correspondence might not only generate interference between the two language codes but also induce a general processing cost in the entire spoken language system.
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spelling pubmed-83533682021-08-11 The Effect of Orthographic Transparency on Auditory Word Recognition Across the Development of Reading Proficiency Bakhtiar, Mehdi Mokhlesin, Maryam Pattamadilok, Chotiga Politzer-Ahles, Stephen Zhang, Caicai Front Psychol Psychology A question under debate in psycholinguistics is the nature of the relationship between spoken and written languages. Although it has been extensively shown that orthographic transparency, which varies across writing systems, strongly affects reading performance, its role in speech processing is much less investigated. The present study addressed this issue in Persian, whose writing system provides a possibility to assess the impact of orthographic transparency on spoken word recognition in young children at different stages of reading acquisition. In Persian, the long vowels are systematically present in the script, whereas the spelling correspondence of short vowels is progressively omitted from the script in the course of reading acquisition, thus, turning transparent into opaque spelling. Based on this unique characteristic, we tested 144 monolingual Persian-speaking nonreaders (i.e., preschoolers) and readers (second graders to fifth graders and young adults) in an auditory lexical decision task using transparent and opaque words. Overall, the results showed that, in accordance with the fact that the diacritics of short vowels are progressively omitted during the second year of schooling, the stimuli containing short vowels (opaque words) were recognized more slowly than transparent ones in third graders. Interestingly, there is a hint that the emergence of the transparency effect in the third graders was associated with an overall slower recognition speed in this group compared to their younger peers. These findings indicate that learning opaque spelling-sound correspondence might not only generate interference between the two language codes but also induce a general processing cost in the entire spoken language system. Frontiers Media S.A. 2021-07-27 /pmc/articles/PMC8353368/ /pubmed/34385960 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.691989 Text en Copyright © 2021 Bakhtiar, Mokhlesin, Pattamadilok, Politzer-Ahles and Zhang. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Psychology
Bakhtiar, Mehdi
Mokhlesin, Maryam
Pattamadilok, Chotiga
Politzer-Ahles, Stephen
Zhang, Caicai
The Effect of Orthographic Transparency on Auditory Word Recognition Across the Development of Reading Proficiency
title The Effect of Orthographic Transparency on Auditory Word Recognition Across the Development of Reading Proficiency
title_full The Effect of Orthographic Transparency on Auditory Word Recognition Across the Development of Reading Proficiency
title_fullStr The Effect of Orthographic Transparency on Auditory Word Recognition Across the Development of Reading Proficiency
title_full_unstemmed The Effect of Orthographic Transparency on Auditory Word Recognition Across the Development of Reading Proficiency
title_short The Effect of Orthographic Transparency on Auditory Word Recognition Across the Development of Reading Proficiency
title_sort effect of orthographic transparency on auditory word recognition across the development of reading proficiency
topic Psychology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8353368/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34385960
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.691989
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