Haskins Publications

Number	497
Year	1985
Drawer	8
Entry Date	11/19/1999
Authors	Feldman, L., Lukatela, G., & Turvey, M. T.
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Publication	Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 39, 492-510.
url	http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL0497.pdf
Abstract	Investigated whether beginning readers who have learned both the Roman and Cyrillic alphabets can be distinguished by their sensitivity to phonological ambiguity. 64 Yugoslavian students (34 3rd and 34 5th graders) rapidly named familiar words and unfamiliar pseudowords written either in the Roman or Cyrillic alphabet that were either phonologically ambiguous or not. Phonological ambiguity was produced by using letter strings that, when transcribed in Roman or when transcribed in Cyrillic, contained 1 or more ambiguous characters. Ambiguous characters are those letters shared by the 2 alphabets that receive different phonemic interpretations in the 2 alphabets. The controls for phonologically ambiguous words were the same words in their alternative, nonambiguous alphabetic transcription. Consistent with previous experiments on adults, the phonologically ambiguous form of a word or pseudoword was named much more slowly than the phonologically unambiguous form. For Ss who were equally proficient in both Roman and Cyrillic, the effect of phonological ambiguity was greater as they named letter strings faster. Assuming that reading fluency correlates with naming latency, it is argued that the better beginning reader is more phonologically analytic.
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