An evaluation of the ?basic orthographic syllabic structure? in a phonologically shallow orthography

Abstract

The notion of a “Basic Orthographic Syllabic Structure” (BOSS) (Taft 1979a) was examined in the phonologically shallow orthography of Serbo-Croatian, which is a highly inflected language written in two alphabets — Roman and Cyrillic. Some characters are shared by both alphabets and retain the same pronunciation in each, some are unique to one alphabet, and some are ambiguous, i.e., receive different readings in the two alphabets. Thus, a letter string composed of common and ambiguous characters might be pronounced in one way if read in Roman and in a different way if read in Cyrillic. Lexical decisions were made on a set of words that met the following criteria: When written in Cyrillic, the nominative singular form of the word was phonologically ambiguous while the dative singular form of the word was unambiguous; when written in Roman, both grammatical forms of the word had only one possible pronunciation. Results indicated that the relation between the lexical decisions to the nominative singular and dative singular forms of the same word depended upon the alphabet in which the words were written. The BOSS perspective anticipates the same relationship between grammatical forms in both alphabets, since inflected forms of the same word must share the same BOSS and equivalent affixes must occur with the same frequency. In addition, the results showed that the number of ambiguous characters is a significant determinant of the decision latencies when no unique characters are present. The BOSS perspective was dismissed in favor of the view that the lexical representation of Serbo-Croatian words is phonological and not purely orthographic.