Orthographic variations and visual information processing.

Based upon an analysis of how graphemic symbols are mapped onto spoken languages, three distinctive writing systems with three different relations between script and speech relationships are identified. They are logography, syllabary, and alphabet, developed sequentially in the history of mankind. It is noted that this trend of development seems to coincide with the trend of cognitive development of children. This coincidence may imply that different cognitive processes are required for achieving reading proficiency in different writing systems. The studies reviewed include experiments on visual scanning, visual lateralization, perceptual demands, word recognition, speech recoding, and sentence comprehension. Results from such comparisons of reading behaviors across different orthographies suggest that human visual information processing is indeed affected by orthographic variation, but only at the lower levels (data-driven, or bottom-up processes). With respect to the higher-level processing (concept-driven, or top-down processes), reading behavior seems to be immune to orthographic variations. Further analyses of segmentation in script as well as in speech reveal that every orthography transcribes sentences at the level of words and that the transcription is achieved in a morphemic way.