Table 3 Orthographic depth features across English, Chinese, Filipino, and Hindi
Domain-specific language skill | Orthographic depth | |
|---|---|---|
Definition | The reliability of print-to-speech correspondence. Shallow orthographies are easy to predict pronunciation based on the spelling of the written word whereas deep orthography contains variation of different pronunciations for the same spellings (Ziegler & Goswami, 2005) | |
English | Deep orthography | An opaque language with multiple pronunciations of the same phoneme. For example, the combination ea can be pronounced in three ways: head (hɛd), steak (steɪk), and meat (miːt) |
Chinese | Deep orthography | Over 80% of Chinese characters are semantic-phonetic compounds comprising a phonetic radical (sound clue) and a semantic radical (meaning clue). The mapping between phonetic radical and the sound of its embedded character is statistical, varying from no relation (e.g., 倩 /siːn˨/–青 /t͡sʰɪŋ˥/) to some relation (i.e., same onset: 猜/ t͡sʰaːi˥/–青 /t͡sʰɪŋ˥/; same rhyme: 精 /t͡sɪŋ˥/–青 /t͡sʰɪŋ˥/), and to highly related (e.g., 清 /t͡sʰɪŋ˥/–青 /t͡sʰɪŋ˥/) |
Hindi | Shallow orthography | Devanagari script is transparent characterized by high grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence. However, the decoding of complex written form relies on morpheme analysis and syllable segmentation principle. For example, when decoding a bi-syllabic word दौड़ना /d̪ ɔːɖnɑː/ (to run), syllables are segmented as दौड़ /d̪ɔːɖ/ (CVC) (run) + ना /nɑː/, (CV) (to perform an action) and each syllable (a combination of consonant “न” /n/ + vowel “ा” /ɑː/) forms one orthographic unit (“ना”, /nɑː/) |
Filipino | Shallow orthography | A transparent language where grapheme and phoneme mapping is highly consistent. There are no silent letters or multiple pronunciations of phonemes. For example, in the word “kumain” /kumain/ (eat), all the phonemes can be heard unlike in English where “ai” will become the long a. Thus, reading in Filipino is easy as long as an individual knows the sounds of the letters and can blend them together |