Highly regular orthographies that encode sound in a transparent manner (e.g., Spanish) are referred to as shallow orthographies, while those with irregular spelling-to-sound mappings like English are referred to as deep orthographies. According to the Orthographic Depth Hypothesis, the process of reading a shallow orthography activates more phonological information than reading a deep orthography, because the former encodes phonological information in a more transparent way. This cross-orthography study will investigate how the orthographic depth of a writing system influences semantic and phonological activation when reading a first language (L1) versus a second language (L2). The first goal of the present study is to attempt to extend the predictive power of the Orthographic Depth Hypothesis to semantic activation. Orthographies that only weakly activate phonological information might strongly activate semantic information during reading. A second goal is to better understand orthographic transfer in L2 reading acquisition. The proposed experiments will test the hypothesis that the occurrence of orthographic transfer depends on relative orthographic depth of the L1-L2 pairing.
Both the traditional isolated word method and an innovative sentence priming method will be used to conduct primed semantic category judgment tasks and primed naming tasks to assess priming. This will determine how early semantic and phonological priming effects occur, how strong the priming effects are, and how long the priming effects persist. The participation of 3 groups of L2 learners (i.e., native English speakers, advanced Chinese learners of English, and advanced Spanish learners of English) will allow us to examine the activation patterns of English and Chinese, and whether L1 literacy background influences L2 activation patterns.
The proposed study will extend current knowledge of how orthography shapes cognitive mechanism and how L1 orthography influences L2 learning. One of the implications for education is that the transparency differences in phonology between L1 and L2 orthographies can influence learners' performance in L2 reading. Specific teaching methods should be designed to help learners adjust their activation patterns to L2 orthography.
During silent reading, the meaning of words (their semantics) and their sound (their phonology) are activated in readers' minds. Although Chinese script does not have as many clues to sound as alphabetic writing systems like English, researchers have discovered that words' sounds are activated while reading Chinese. This dissertation tests the proposal that the phonology of words are not activated as strongly while reading Chinese compared to English. This proposal is consisted with the information properties of Chinese, but is currently controversial. It is also not known whether words' semantic are activated equally strongly in Chinese and English. This dissertation also examined semantic and phonological activation in reading English as a second language, in order to shed light on how first language (L1) literacy experiences influence second language (L2) reading. Several priming studies were carried out with native Chinese speakers and native English speakers reading their L1. Semantic priming and phonological inhibition were both found in the two language groups, suggesting a reading universal: any linguistic information encoded in orthographies will be activated in the reading process regardless of the manners in which it is encoded. But some differences were found that are consistent with the informational properties of Chinese compared to English. Semantic priming occurred only in the sentence-based priming paradigm in Chinese reading, and only in the single-word priming paradigm in English reading, implying different semantic processes in reading these two orthographies. Phonological inhibition appeared for only low frequency Chinese targets, but for both high and low frequency English targets, suggesting that phonology plays a more important role in reading English than in reading Chinese. Native Chinese speakers and native Spanish speakers who were advanced learners of English also performed a priming study in their L2, English. In the priming study, semantic priming was found only in the Chinese group, whereas phonological inhibition was found only in the Spanish group. These results demonstrate orthographic transfer, indicating that reading habits from the first language (either Chinese or Spanish) translate to the second language, English. Implications for Chinese learning English as a foreign language are that learners may want to practice "breaking the silent reading habit" and try to hear the sounds of words as they read silently. This could be helped by reading poetry or sound lyrics which containing rhyming words.
