Unpredictability and complexity of print-to-speech correspondences increase reliance on lexical processes: more evidence for the orthographic depth hypothesis

ABSTRACT

The Orthographic Depth Hypothesis [Katz, L., & Frost, R. (1992). The reading process is different for different orthographies: The orthographic depth hypothesis. In R. Frost & L. Katz (Eds.), Orthography, phonology, morphology, and meaning (pp. 67–84). Amsterdam: Elsevier Science] proposes cross-linguistic differences in the involvement of lexical processing during reading. In orthographies with complex, inconsistent, and/or incomplete sublexical correspondences, decoding is more difficult and therefore slower. This gives more time to the lexical route to retrieve information, and leads to a greater ratio of lexical processing. We test whether this mechanism applies both for words with inconsistent (in English) and for words with complex (in French) correspondences. As complex correspondences are sufficient to derive a correct pronunciation, an increase in lexical processing may not occur. In a reading-aloud task, we used the frequency effect to measure lexical processing. The data showed stronger involvement of lexical processing for inconsistent compared to consistent words, and for complex compared to simple words. The results confirm that Katz and Frost’s proposed mechanism applies to different sources of orthographic depth.

KEYWORDS:

• Dual-route model
• cross-linguistic
• French
• English

Acknowledgements

We thank Melvin Yap and David Balota for making the trial-level ELP data available to us, and Sachiko Kinoshita for valuable discussions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹In the accuracy analyses, we did not allow slope to vary across participants, because this model failed to converge. This is a common issue with maximal models (see Bates, Kliegl, Vasishth, & Baayen, 2015). However, as the accuracy data were not interpreted, this is not an issue for the current study.