Abstract
This study investigated whether the phonological representation of a word is modulated by its orthographic representation in case of a mismatch between the two representations. Such a mismatch is found in Persian, where short vowels are represented phonemically but not orthographically. Persian adult literates, Persian adult illiterates, and German adult literates were presented with two auditory tasks, an AX-discrimination task and a reversal task. We assumed that if orthographic representations influence phonological representations, Persian literates should perform worse than Persian illiterates or German literates on items with short vowels in these tasks. The results of the discrimination tasks showed that Persian literates and illiterates as well as German literates were approximately equally competent in discriminating short vowels in Persian words and pseudowords. Persian literates did not well discriminate German words containing phonemes that differed only in vowel length. German literates performed relatively poorly in discriminating German homographic words that differed only in vowel length. Persian illiterates were unable to perform the reversal task in Persian. The results of the other two participant groups in the reversal task showed the predicted poorer performance of Persian literates on Persian items containing short vowels compared to items containing long vowels only. German literates did not show this effect in German. Our results suggest two distinct effects of orthography on phonemic representations: whereas the lack of orthographic representations seems to affect phonemic awareness, homography seems to affect the discriminability of phonemic representations.
Highlights
IntroductionBy learning to read and write an alphabetic writing system, a connection is made between constituents of written words (letters/graphemes) and the constituents of the spoken forms of words (sounds/phonemes) in memory
By learning to read and write an alphabetic writing system, a connection is made between constituents of written words and the constituents of the spoken forms of words in memory
Persian literates as well as the two control groups performed well on Persian words/pseudowords containing short vowels as they did on words/pseudowords containing only long vowels
Summary
By learning to read and write an alphabetic writing system, a connection is made between constituents of written words (letters/graphemes) and the constituents of the spoken forms of words (sounds/phonemes) in memory. A number of researchers have claimed that written constituents can affect the way the spoken constituents are perceived and processed Ehri 2014; Kolinsky 2015) Such effects might not be prominent in transparent orthographies where the grapheme-phoneme mapping across words is consistent. Further effects of orthography on explicit phonemic processing have been shown in tasks such as phoneme addition and deletion (Mann and Wimmer 2002; Caravolas and Bruck 1993), phonological length judgment (Cassar and Treiman 1997), and rhyme detection (Prakash et al 1993)
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