A cross-linguistic investigation of reading behaviour between a consistent and an inconsistent orthography: An eye-tracking experiment

Abstract

According to the Simple View of Reading (SVR; Gough & Tunmer, 1986; Hoover & Gough, 1991), all variation in reading can be accounted for by two component skills; decoding and language comprehension. However, these skills also need to be considered in the context of orthography. Languages differ considerably in terms of their orthographic structure; inconsistent orthographies have an inconsistent grapheme-phoneme conversion, like that of English, and consistent orthographies consist of a consistent conversion, like that of Italian or Spanish. The Orthographic Depth Hypothesis (Katz & Frost, 1992) claims that efficient reading requires readers to adapt reading strategies to meet the demands of the orthography being read. Languages with varying depths of orthographies may require distinct reading strategies that drive the development of specific reading skills and may affect a bilingual’s ability to efficiently comprehend texts in languages of varying orthographic depths. Further, inconsistent orthographies may place higher demands on word reading than consistent orthographies. According to the Hypothesis of Granularity and Transparency (Wydell & Butterworth, 1999), orthography can be broken down into two main features that may be responsible for incidences of phonological dyslexia; ‘transparency’ and ‘granularity’. The HGT argues that transparent languages will yield fewer instances of phonological dyslexia than opaque orthographies. However, even in opaque orthographies, if the smallest graphemic unit representing sound is equal to a whole character or a whole word (i.e., coarse grain), as opposed to a syllable or phoneme (i.e., fine grain), it will not produce a high prevalence of phonological dyslexia. English dyslexics are known to have poor decoding skills, which may cause them to engage in compensatory eye-movement patterns during reading. The current experiment used eye-tracking techniques to compare reading strategies in three groups: native-English monolingual readers with and without developmental dyslexia (DD) and Spanish-English bilinguals reading in both their native and second language.