Chapter 3 Basic Processes in Reading: Is the Orthographic Depth Hypothesis Sinking?

Abstract

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses oral reading in alphabetic English, a deep orthography; and the orthographic depth hypothesis and the evidence that purports to support it. Orthographies may be defined as either “shallow” or “deep,” depending on the ease of predicting the pronunciation of a word from its spelling. In shallow orthographies, the spelling-sound correspondence is direct: given the rules, anyone can immediately “name” the words correctly. In contrast, in deep orthographies the relationship is less direct, and readers must learn the arbitrary or unusual pronunciations of irregular words such as “yacht.” A consequence of this linguistic difference between deep and shallow orthographies is that it is often assumed that the oral reading of shallow orthographies is qualitatively different from the oral reading of deep orthographies. Old and new evidence from studies of Persian, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, and Croatian, which appears to undermine the essential tenents of the orthographic depth hypothesis is reviewed and assessed in the chapter. The orthographic depth hypothesis in its strong form makes a very simple claim: there is no orthographic input lexicon in the minds of readers processing orthographies, which consist entirely of words with consistent spelling-sound correspondences. The argument is that orthographic access to semantics and the direct mapping from orthographic input lexicon to phonological output lexicon only exists in scripts with inconsistent spelling-sound correspondences, and does so precisely because of this inconsistency.