The Reading Process is Different for Different Orthographies: The Orthographic Depth Hypothesis

This chapter discusses that the varying dependence on the alphabetic principle may mean for the mental processes involved in reading and writing. Within the group of alphabetic orthographies itself, there are varying degrees of dependence on the strict alphabetic principle: the range of correspondence between grapheme and phoneme varies both in consistency and completeness. The degree of this dependence is to some extent a function of a language's characteristic phonology and morphology, just as was the choice of the kind of orthography itself. Even among the various alphabetic writing systems themselves, there are major differences in the degree to which they mirror the phonemic structure of their respective spoken languages. The reason for the differences is largely accounted for by the particular phonological and morphological characteristics of each language. For example, standard written Hebrew is an orthography in which all diacritics (or points) are omitted. These diacritics represent nearly all of the vowels and are also used to disambiguate some of the consonants.