Languages differ in the degree of covariance between spelling and correspondence sound patterns. Despite the variation across languages, evidence from new and particularly sensitive experimental procedures suggests that phonology plays a leading (rather than ancillary) role in skilled reading, regardless of the orthographic """"""""depth"""""""" of a given language's writing system. Languages also differ in the degree of co- variance between spelling and meaning. Similarly, new experimental methods are revealing that, across different writing systems, morphology assumes a common function of systematizing the relations between forms and meanings and in so doing plays a pivotal role in fluent visual word identification. The studies proposed in Project IV are directed at the mechanisms for deriving phonology and morphology from a word's orthographic form to determine a word's pronunciation and meaning. The studies are shaped by two hypotheses. The phonological coherence hypothesis proposes that phonological representations achieve resolution faster, and reach states of stability that are greater, than other linguistic representations. Consequently, phonology provides both the earliest and the primary influence on lexical dynamics. The emergent morphology hypothesis proposes that morphological representations. Consequently, phonology provides both the morphological representations arise from and subsequently constrain, the mutual dynamics of orthographic, phonological and semantic activations. The experiments are directed at uncovering fundamental aspects of the roles of phonology and morphology in fluent reading by studying word recognition in contrasting orthographies: the shallow orthographies of Serbo-Croatian and Korean and the deeper orthographies of English, Hebrew, and Chinese. A principal focus of the experiments in each language is the speed (at time scales of the order of .1 second) and automaticity of processing as indicative of the ventral mechanism under investigation in Project IV. Connectionist networks will be pursued that are capable of accommodating the characteristic results of each orthography. In addition. Methods of non-linear dynamics will be applied to provide new quantifications of the visual word recognition process in terms of its dimensionality and complexity (e.g., fractal dimension) as a function of task difficulty and skill level.
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