CROSS-LANGUGE STUDIES OF PROCESSES BASIC TO READING

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Five questions are addressed of how individual words, in isolation and in word contexts, are visually perceived by adult readers, beginning readers and agrammatical readers (aphasics). Information processing theory and methods (lexical decision, rapid naming) are used. The first question is whether phonologically-mediated access and visual access of lexical memory depend on the orthography. The phonologically precise Serbo-Croatian orthography is compared with the phonologically less precise English orthography. The experiments exploit Yogoslavia's two alphabets and its bialphabetic readers. Though largely different, the Roman and Cyrillic alphabets share some letter forms, a few of which represent different phonemes in the two alphabets. The second question focuses on how word kinds are represented in the internal lexicon. The nouns and adjectives of Serbo-Croatian are declined, its verbs are conjugated. Experiments investigate the relation's among the representations of a noun's inflected forms under conditions of visual and auditory access. With repetition priming providing a benchmark, the strengths of the various connections among a noun's grammatical cases are evaluated in the mature and the beginning reader. The third question explores among linguistic subsystems in reading; for example, how independent is the system that evaluates the grammatical consistency of a word sequence from the lexical processor and the reader's non-linguistic, pragmatic knowledge? The question is posed, in part, as a study of the priming of one word by another where the words agree or disagree in case, number and/or gender, are semantically related or unrelated, and refer to a real-world event or an anomaly. What is the degree of lateralization of the phonological and grammatical functions addressed in the preceding questions? Lexical decisions on words presented briefly in the left and right visual half-fields (to the right and left hemisphere, respectively) are studied as functions of phonological ambiquity and of grammatical congruency with preceding words. Studies with aphasics complement these studies with normals. The fifth and final question asks: How is the acquisition of reading affected by the orthography in which the language is written. Beginning readers of Serbo-Croatian and English are compared on common tasks. The question is directed at an analytic reading strategy and at the claim that an analytic strategy distinguishes the more-fluent from the less-fluent.