eye-tracking example, from
Seeing morphemes: Loss of visibility during the retinal stabilization
of compound and pseudocompound words by A. W. Inhoff and R. Topolski,
1994, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 20(4):840-853.
Let's say that you believe that when people read in unfamiliar
fonts they make more use of the assembled route to word recognition.
How could this hypothesis be tested?
How might the orthographic depth of a writing system be related to the
issue of the sublexical units involved in word recognition? For example,
would preserving morphological relations in the orthography at the expense
of some spelling-to-sound regularity influence which sublexical units are
functional? How could you test this empirically?
Your neighbor has a third-grade child who has had a great deal of
difficulty learning to read. Your neighbor sees an infomercial
that advertises special glasses, which the advertiser claims gives correction
for the visual processing problems of most dyslexics. What would you tell
your neighbor? What evidence is there to support your position?
A writing system has to cope with several demands. To make life
easier for learners, the spelling of a word should be largely based on
how it sounds. But spelling also shouldn't be affected by regional
pronounciation differences; someone raised in Boston should spell "yard"
the same as someone raised in Fresno. A writing system should distinguish
homophones, such as "break" and "brake," and also capture some of the logic
of word meaning, so that "write" and "writing" should start with the same
string of letters. Existing writing systems, such as Chinese logograms,
English spelling, and Japanese kana, are kinds of attempts to satisfy these
demands. If one was to try to improve on English spelling, where would
one start?
