Alphabetism and the science of reading: from the perspective of the akshara languages

Frontiers in Psychology

Sonali Nag¹ 

关键词: akshara;    orthographic processing;    cross-linguistic;    alphasyllabary;    hindi;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00866

学科分类：心理学（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

An interesting area of enquiry in reading science is the ways in which different writing systems represent language. Discussions have centered around the adaptations seen between writing systems and languages (Perfetti and Harris, 2013) and the related notions of deservedness of a writing system for a language (Halliday, 1977), optimality (Frost, 2012) and level of orthography-language or “grapholinguistic” equilibrium (Seidenberg, 2011). Among the many ideas of relative goodness of writing systems is also a misplaced superiority assigned to alphabet-based orthographies, which has been critically labeled as “alphabetism” (Share, 2014). Share counters the superiority claim with psychoacoustic, historic, anthropological and preliminary experimental evidence to show that syllable-based writing systems are perhaps the better system, at least for some aspects of the orthography-language relationship. The defining parameters for placing symbol systems in a hierarchy are however, as yet, unclear (see Frost, 2012 for a discussion). It is for this very reason that reading research (and the practice it influences) must be alert to unqualified generalizations made from studies conducted in a single writing system. Evidence from robust cross-orthographic experimentation is the best moderator of such universalism. The burgeoning body of work from the Chinese languages has for example broadened the field, and perhaps snuffed out “alphabetism” in some domains (e.g., neural bases of reading and the preferred ordering of symbols as linear: Perfetti et al., 2010). Some insights are now also available from experimental work and surveys in Japanese Hiragana (e.g., Fletcher-Flinn et al., 2014). More recently, research in the Indic alphasyllabaries highlights the role of orthography-specific investigations in the quest for a more inclusive reading science (Nag, 2007, 2014).

【 授权许可】

CC BY