| Abstract | The Serbo-Croatian language is written in 2 alphabets, Roman and Cyrillic. Both orthographies transcribe the sounds of the language in a regular and straightforward fashion and may, therefore, be referred to as phonologically shallow in contrast to English orthography, which is phonologically deep. Most of the alphabet characters are unique to one alphabet or the other. However, several shared characters exist, some of which receive the same reading and some of which receive a different reading, in the 2 alphabets. It is possible, therefore, to construct a variety of types of letter strings. In a lexical decision task conducted with 48 university students who were bialphabetical readers, it was shown that words that can be read in 2 different ways are accepted more slowly and with greater error than words that can be read only 1 way. It is concluded that for the phonologically shallow writing systems of Serbo-Croatian, lexical decision proceeds with reference to the phonology. |
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