Haskins Publications

Number	566
Year	1987
Drawer	10
Entry Date	11/17/1999
Authors	Frost, R., Katz, L., & Bentin, S.
Contact
Publication	Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, Vol. 13, No. 1, 104-115.
url	http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL0566.pdf
Abstract	We investigated the psychological reality of the concept of orthographical depth and its influence on visual word recognition by examining naming performance in Hebrew, English, and Serbo-Croatian. Experiment 1 revealed that the lexical status of the stimulus (high-frequency words, low-frequency words, and nonwords) significantly affected naming in Hebrew (the deepest of the three orthographies). This effect was only moderate in English and nonsignificant in Serbo-Croatian (the shallowest of the three orthographies). Moreover, only in Hebrew did lexical status have similar effects on naming and lexical decision performance. Experiment 2 revealed that semantic priming effects in naming were larger in Hebrew than in English and completely absent in Serbo-Croatian. Experiment 3 revealed that a large proportion of nonlexical tokens (nonwords) in the stimulus list affects naming words in Hebrew and in English, but not in Serbo-Croatian. Results support the orthographical depth hypothesis and suggest, in general, that in shallow orthographies phonology is generated directly from print, whereas in deep orthographies phonology is derived from the internal lexicon.
Notes