Orthography, Phonology, Morphology, and Meaning: An Overview

This chapter presents an overview to the book called Orthography, Phonology, Morphology, and Meaning. This book is divided into two parts. Part 1, Language and Orthography points out the ways in which the phonological and morphological structures of a language have, historically, often determined the kind of orthography that is adopted for a language. The variety that exists in spoken languages has given rise to a variety of orthographies, each orthography reflecting a unique relationship to its language's structural characteristics. In Part 2, Orthography and Phonology, two major controversial issues are treated. It discusses the concern over the role of phonology in lexical access and focuses on experimental work on this topic. Addressing the lexicon is a matter of considerable importance because it is vital in understanding the reading process, to know the nature of the internal representations generated in the information flow. There is also a second issue: the problem of understanding how readers achieve word recognition bears directly on the question of the preferred method of teaching reading.