Cover not available
Part of
Handbook of Pragmatics: 22nd Annual Installment
Edited by Jan-Ola Östman and Jef Verschueren
[Handbook of Pragmatics 22] 2019
► pp. 149–180

Orthography and cognition

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: Language and communication
  • 2.Different writing systems
  • 3.The encoding principles of an alphabetic orthography
  • 4.Alphabetic writing systems and our cognitive system
    • 4.1The crucial importance of phonemic awareness
    • 4.2The importance of effective literacy instruction: The success of the phonics method
    • 4.3The importance of phonological skills for understanding dyslexia
  • 5.Cognitive implications of an orthography that encodes a word’s morphemes
    • 5.1The importance of root awareness in young children
    • 5.2A morpheme-based spelling paradox in experienced spellers
    • 5.3The impact of encoding morphological structure on word recognition
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 23 December 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/hop.22.ort1
References (78)
References
Adams, M. J. 1990. Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning about Print. Cambridge, MA: Bolt, Beranek, and Newman, Inc.Google Scholar
Akmajian, A., R. A. Demers and R. M. Hamish. 2017. Linguistics: An Introduction to Language and Communication (7th ed.). Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Aro, M. and H. Wimmer. 2003. “Learning to read: English in comparison to six more regular orthographies.” Applied Psycholinguistics 24: 621–635. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Baird, G., V. Slonims, E. Simonoff and K. Dworzynski. 2011. “Impairment in non-word repetition: A marker for language impairment or reading impairment?” Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology 53: 711–716. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Barron, R. B. 1994. “The sound-to-spelling connection: Orthographic activation in auditory word recognition and its implication for the acquisition of phonological awareness and literacy skills.” In The Varieties of Orthographic Knowledge I: Theoretical and Developmental Issues, ed. by V. W. Berninger, 219–242. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bertram, R., H. Baayen and R. Schreuder. 2000. “Effects of family size for complex words.” Journal of Memory and Language 42: 390–405. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Boada, R. and B. F. Pennington. 2006. “Deficient implicit phonological representations in children with dyslexia.” Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 95: 153–193. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Boets, B., H. Op de Beeck, M. Vandermosten, S. K. Scott, C. R. Gillebert, D. Mantini, J. Bulthé, S. Sunaert, J. Wouters and P. Ghesquière. 2013. “Intact but less accessible phonetic representations in adults with dyslexia. Science 342: 1251–1254. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bradley, L and P. E. Bryant. 1978. “Difficulties in auditory organisation as a possible cause of reading backwardness.” Nature 271: 746–747. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bryant, P. and L. Bradley. 1985. Children’s reading problems. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Casalis, S., H. Deacon and S. Pacton. 2011. “How specific is the connection between morphological awareness and spelling? A study of French children.” Applied Psycholinguistics 32: 499–511. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cassar, M. and R. Treiman. 1997. “The beginnings of orthographic knowledge: Children’s knowledge of double letters in words.” Journal of Educational Psychology 89: 631–644. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Crystal, D. 2010. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (3rd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
De Jong, N., L. Feldman, R. Schreuder, M. Pastizzo and H. Baayen. 2002. “The processing and representation of Dutch and English compounds: Peripheral morphological, and central orthographic effects.” Brain and Language 81: 555–567. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
De Jong, N., R. Schreuder and H. Baayen. 2000. “The morphological family size effect and morphology.” Language and Cognitive Processes 15: 329–365. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Deacon, H. and P. Bryant. 2006. “This turnip’s not for turning: Children’s morphological awareness and their use of stem morphemes in spelling.” British Journal of Developmental Psychology 24: 567–575. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Denckla, M. B. and R. G. Rudel. 1976. “Rapid ’Automatized’ Naming (R.A.N.): Dyslexia differentiated from other learning disabilities.” Neuropsychologia 14: 471–479. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Diependaele, K., Grainger, G., & Sandra, D. 2012. “Derivational morphology and skilled reading: An empirical overview.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Psycholinguistics, ed. by M. Spivey, K. McRae & M. Joanisse, 311-332. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Dietrich, J. A. and S. A. Brady. 2001. “Phonological representations of adult poor readers: An investigation of specificity and stability.” Applied Psycholinguistics 22: 383–418. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ehri, L. C., S. R. Nunes, D. M. Willows, B. V. Schuster, Z. Yaghoub-Zadeh and T. Shanahan. 2001. “Phonemic awareness instruction helps children learn to read: Evidence from the National Reading Panel’s meta-analysis.” Reading Research Quarterly 36 (3): 250–287. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ehri, L. C. and L. Wilce. 1980. “The influence of orthography on readers’ conceptualization of the phonemic structure of words.” Applied Psycholinguistics 1: 371–385. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Elbro, C. 1998. “When reading is “readn” or somthn. Distinctness of phonological representations of lexical items in normal and disabled readers.” Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 39: 149–153. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Elbro, C. and M. N. Jensen. 2005. “Quality of phonological representations, word learning, and phoneme awareness in dyslexic and normal readers.” Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 46: 375–384. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Emmorey, K., S. Mehta and T. J. Grabowski. 2007. “The neural correlates of sign versus word production.” Neuroimage 36: 202–8. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fayol, M., P. Largy and P. Lemaire. 1994. “Cognitive overload and orthographic errors: When cognitive overload enhances subject-verb agreement errors: A study in French written language.” The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology A: Human Experimental Psychology 47A: 437–464. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Flesch, R. 1955. Why Johnny Can’t Read – And What You Can Do About It. New York: Harper & Row.Google Scholar
1981. Why Johnny Still Can’t Read: A New Look at the Scandal of Our Schools. New York: Harper & RowGoogle Scholar
Frith, U., H. Wimmer and K. Landerl. 1998. “Differences in phonological recoding in German and English-speaking children.” Scientific Studies of Reading 2: 31–54. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Galuschka, K., E. Ise, K. Krick and G. Schulte-Korne. 2014. “Effectiveness of treatment approaches for children and adolescents with reading disabilities: A meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials.” PLOS ONE 9, Article e89900. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Goswami, U. and P. Bryant. 1990. Phonological skills and learning to read. Hove: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Kenneth S. Goodman. 1967. “Reading: A psycholinguistic guessing game.” Journal of the Reading Specialist 6: 126–135. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Krott, A., R. Schreuder and H. Baayen. 2002. “Linking elements in Dutch noun-noun compounds: Constituent families as analogical predictors for response latencies.” Brain and Language 81: 708–722. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Landerl, K. and H. Wimmer. 2008. “Development of word reading fluency and spelling in a consistent orthography: An 8-year follow-up.” Journal of Educational Psychology 100 (1): 150–161. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Largy, P., M. Fayol and P. Lemaire. 1996. “The homophone effect in written French: The case of verb-noun inflection errors.” Language and Cognitive Processes 11: 217–255. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Liberman, I. Y., D. Shankweiler, F. W. Fischer and B. Carter. 1974. “Explicit syllable and phoneme segmentation in the young child.” Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 18 (2): 201–212. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Longtin, C., J. Segui and P. Hallé. 2003. “Morphological priming without morphological relationship.” Cognitive Processes 18: 313–334. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lüdeling, A. and N. de Jong. 2002. “German particle verbs and word formation.” In Verb-Particle Explorations, ed. by N. Dehé, R. Jackendoff, A. McIntyre and S. Urban, 315–333. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Lyon, G. R. 1995. “Toward a definition of dyslexia.” Annals of Dyslexia 45: 3–27. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McGregor, W. B. 2015. Linguistics. An Introduction. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.Google Scholar
Morais, J. and P. Mousty. 1992. “The causes of phonemic awareness.” In Analytic Approaches to Human Cognition, ed. by J. Alegria, D. Holender, J. Junca de Morais and M. Radeau, 193–212. Oxford, England: North-Holland.Google Scholar
Morais, J., L. Cary, J. Alegria and P. Bertelson. 1979. “Does awareness of speech as a sequence of phones arise spontaneously?” Cognition 7: 323–331. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Moscoso del Prado Martín, F., R. Bertram, T. Häikiö, S. Schreuder and H. Baayen. 2004. “Morphological family size in a morphologically rich language: The case of Finnish compared with Dutch and Hebrew.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 30: 1271–1278. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Radford, A., M. Atkinson, D. Britain, H. Clahsen and H. Spencer. 2009. Linguistics: An Introduction (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ramus, F. 2003. “Developmental dyslexia: Specific phonological deficit or general sensorimotor dysfunction?” Current Opinion in Neurobiology 13: 212–218. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rastle, K., M. Davis and B. New. 2004. “The broth in my brother’s brothel: Morpho-orthographic segmentation in visual word recognition.” Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 11: 1090–1098. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Robertson, E. and M. Joanisse. 2010. “Spoken sentence comprehension in children with dyslexia and language impairment: The roles of syntax and working memory.” Applied Psycholinguistics 31: 141–165. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sandler, W. 2018. “The body as evidence for the nature of language.” Frontiers in Psychology 9: 1782. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sandra, D. 2010. “Homophone dominance at the whole-word and sub-word levels: Spelling errors suggest full-form storage of regularly inflected verb forms.” Language and speech 53: 405–444. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
forthcoming. “Morphological units: A theoretical and psycholinguistic perspective.” In Oxford Bibliography in Morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sandra, D. and M. Fayol. 2003. “Spelling errors with a view on the mental lexicon: Frequency and proximity effects in misspelling homophonous regular verb forms in Dutch and French.” In Morphological structure in Language Processing, Trends in Linguistics series, ed. by R. H. Baayen and R. Schreuder, 485–514. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Sandra, D., S. Frisson and F. Daems. 1999. “Why simple verb forms can be so difficult to spell: The influence of homophone frequency and distance in Dutch.” Brain and language 68: 277–283. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Scarborough, H. S. 1990. “Very early language deficits in dyslexic children.” Child Development 61 (6): 1728–1743. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schraeyen, K., W. Van der Elst, A. Geudens, P. Ghesquière and D. Sandra. 2019. “Short-term memory problems for phonemes’ serial order in adults with dyslexia: Evidence from a different analysis of the nonword repetition task.” Applied Psycholinguistics 40: 613–644. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schreuder, R. and H. Baayen. 1997. “How simplex complex words can be.” Journal of Memory and Language 37: 118–139. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Seidenberg, M. S. and M. K. Tanenhaus. 1979. “Orthographic effects on rhyme monitoring.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory 5 (6): 546–554. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sénéchal, M. 2000. “Morphological effects in children’s spelling of French words.” Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology 54: 76–86. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sénéchal, M., M. Basque and T. Leclaire. 2006. “Morphological knowledge as revealed in children’s spelling accuracy and reports of spelling strategies.” Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 95: 231–254. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Smith, Frank. 1971. Understanding Reading: A Psycholinguistic Analysis of Reading and Learning to Read. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.Google Scholar
Snowling, M. J. 2000. Dyslexia (2nd ed.). Oxford, England: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Snowling, M. and C. Hulme. 2012. “Interventions for children’s language and literacy difficulties.” International Journal of Language Communication Disorders 47: 27–34. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Snowling, M., N. Goulandris, M. Bowlby and P. Howell. 1986. “Segmentation and speech perception in relation to reading skill: A developmental analysis.” Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 41 (3): 489–507. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sprenger-Charolles, L., P. Colé and W. Serniclaes. 2006. Reading Acquisition and Developmental Dyslexia. New York: Psychology Press.Google Scholar
Swanson, H., G. Trainin, D. Necoechea and D. Hammill. 2003. “Rapid naming, phonological awareness, and reading: A meta-analysis of the correlation evidence.” Review of Educational Research 73: 407–440. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Taylor, J. S. H., M. H. Davis and K. Rastle. 2017. “Comparing and validating methods of reading instruction using behavioural and neural findings in an artificial orthography.” Journal of Experimental Psychology 146: 826–858. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Torgerson, C., G. Brooks and J. Hall. 2006. A Systematic Review of the Research Literature on the Use of Phonics in the Teaching of Reading and Spelling. London: Department for Education and Skills (DfES).Google Scholar
Treiman, R., M. Cassar and A. Zukowski. 1994. “What types of linguistic information do children use in spelling? The case of flaps.” Child Development 65: 1318–1337. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tunmer, W. E. and A. R. Nesdale. 1982. “The effects of digraphs and pseudowords on phonemic segmentation in young children.” Applied Psycholinguistics 3 (4): 299–311. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Vander Stappen, C. and M. Van Reybroeck. 2018. “Phonological Awareness and Rapid Automatized Naming are independent phonological competencies with specific impacts on word reading and spelling: An intervention study.” Frontiers in Psychology 9. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Vellutino, F. R., J. M. Fletcher, M. J. Snowling and D. M. Scanlon. 2004. “Specific reading disability (dyslexia): What have we learned in the past four decades?” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 45: 2–40. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Vellutino, F. R. and D. M. Scanlon. 1982. “Verbal processing in poor and normal readers.” In Verbal processes in children, ed. by C. J. Brainerd and M. Pressley, 189–264. New York: Springer Verlag. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Vellutino, F. R. 1979. Dyslexia: Theory and Research. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
1987. “Dyslexia.” Scientific American 1: 34–41. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Verhaert, N. 2016. Rules or Regularities? The Homophone Dominance Effect in Spelling and Reading Regular Dutch Verb Forms. PhD dissertation. Antwerp: University of Antwerp.Google Scholar
Verschueren, J. 1999. Understanding pragmatics. London: Arnold.Google Scholar
von Frisch, K. and M. Landauer. 1956. “The “Language” and orientation of the honey bee.” Annual Review of Entomology 1: 45–58. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wimmer, H. H. and U. Goswami. 1994. “The influence of orthographic consistency on reading development: Word recognition in English and German children.” Cognition 51: 91–103. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wolf, M., P. G. Bowers and K. Biddle. 2000. “ Naming-speed processes, timing, and reading: A conceptual review.” Journal of learning disabilities 33: 387–407. DOI logoGoogle Scholar