TY - JOUR

T1 - Letter processing in Russian

T2 - Does orthography matter?

AU - Alexeeva, Svetlana

AU - Dobrego, Aleksandra

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2021 The Authors Copyright: Copyright 2021 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.

PY - 2021/7/1

Y1 - 2021/7/1

N2 - Prior research has suggested that the identification and encoding of letter positions within letter strings might be influenced by orthography. Letters in transparent languages (e.g., Greek) with regular grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences are processed sequentially, whereas letters in deep languages (e.g., English) are processed in parallel. In three experiments, we used a visual search paradigm to test this hypothesis on Russian—a relatively transparent language. In Experiment 1, we measured the identification speed of Cyrillic letters at each position in the five-element real words or pronounceable pseudowords. In Experiment 2, the performance was compared to random letter strings, and in Experiment 3, to non-linguistic symbol strings. Our results reveal a search pattern similar to English, excluding strictly serial letter computation, which is inconsistent with the orthography hypothesis. Moreover, we showed that the lexical status and the nature of the string (linguistic/non-linguistic) affect response times for Russian and therefore must be accounted for in models of visual word recognition.

AB - Prior research has suggested that the identification and encoding of letter positions within letter strings might be influenced by orthography. Letters in transparent languages (e.g., Greek) with regular grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences are processed sequentially, whereas letters in deep languages (e.g., English) are processed in parallel. In three experiments, we used a visual search paradigm to test this hypothesis on Russian—a relatively transparent language. In Experiment 1, we measured the identification speed of Cyrillic letters at each position in the five-element real words or pronounceable pseudowords. In Experiment 2, the performance was compared to random letter strings, and in Experiment 3, to non-linguistic symbol strings. Our results reveal a search pattern similar to English, excluding strictly serial letter computation, which is inconsistent with the orthography hypothesis. Moreover, we showed that the lexical status and the nature of the string (linguistic/non-linguistic) affect response times for Russian and therefore must be accounted for in models of visual word recognition.

KW - Letter processing

KW - Letter search task

KW - Lexical status

KW - Russian

KW - Visual search task

KW - Visual word recognition

KW - SERIAL POSITION

KW - LENGTH

KW - MODEL

KW - IDENTIFICATION

KW - EYE-MOVEMENTS

KW - READ

KW - SUPERIORITY

KW - VISUAL WORD RECOGNITION

KW - FREQUENCY

KW - LETTER PERCEPTION

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85107931944&partnerID=8YFLogxK

UR - https://www.mendeley.com/catalogue/69526419-d686-391b-9a1f-bb5ec4725a97/

U2 - 10.1016/j.actpsy.2021.103355

DO - 10.1016/j.actpsy.2021.103355

M3 - Article

AN - SCOPUS:85107931944

VL - 218

JO - Acta Psychologica

JF - Acta Psychologica

SN - 0001-6918

M1 - 103355

ER -