CROSS-LANGUAGE STUDIES OF PROCESSES BASIC TO READING

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The problem of reading, even at the levels of the sentence and extended text, stem largely from difficulties in identifying words. Recognizing a written word entails a mapping from the script to a representation in the reader's internal lexicon. This mapping or decoding is not a natural characteristic of language acquisition (as is the mapping from the spoken word to its lexical representation); rather, it entails specific metalinguistic abilities that rely on careful instruction. The particular form assumed by these abilities, that is, the details of the decoding mechanism, may be constrained by the nature of the orthography that transcribes the language. In part, the proposed research is directed at the claim that for the phonologically precise Serbo-Croatian orthography the decoding mechanism consists of grapheme-to-phoneme conversions that reliably generate phonological codings. These codings are used both to access the lexicon and to guide naming. For the phonologically imprecise English orthography it has become more commonplace to claim that the mapping is strictly visual and that there is no prelexical phonology. Information processing theory and methods (lexical decision, rapid naming, sentence scanning, priming) are used to test these contrasting claims. The experiments employ Yugoslavia's two alphabets and its bialphabetical readers. Both adults and children. Though largely different, the Roman and Cyrillic alphabets share some letter forms, a number of which represent different phonemes in the two alphabets. Additionally, the proposed research explores syntactic processing, its relation to word recognition processes and its possible autonomy. Serbo-Croatina, unlike English, relies primarily on inflections to convey grammatical information. Word priming and sentence scanning experiments are planned in which inflectional agreement is either satisfied or violated. Among the questions to be addressed are these: Is the effect of grammaticality the same for plausible and implausible sentences? Does syntactic processing influence lexical access? Is agrammatic aphasia characterized by the misselection of closed-class morphemes that are within the same syntactic category? Are grammaticality effects scaled to the reading fluency of beginning readers? These investigations into the syntactic component, when coupled with those on prelexical phonology, set the stage for evaluating the hypothesis that deficiencies in the basic decoding processes have consequences for other, higher level linguistic abilities underlying reading comprehension.