A comparative quantitative analysis of Greek orthographic transparency

Abstract

Orthographic transparency refers to the systematicity in the mapping between orthographic letter sequences and phonological phoneme sequences in both directions, for reading and spelling. Measures of transparency previously used in the analysis of orthographies of other languages include regularity, consistency, and entropy. However, previous reports have typically been hampered by severe restrictions, such as using only monosyllables or only word-initial phonemes. Greek is sufficiently transparent to allow complete sequential alignment between graphemes and phonemes, therefore permitting full analyses at both letter and grapheme levels, using every word in its entirety. Here, we report multiple alternative measures of transparency, using both type and token counts, and compare these with estimates for other languages. We discuss the problems stemming from restricted analysis sets and the implications for psycholinguistic experimentation and computational modeling of reading and spelling.