Cognitive Processing of Various Orthographies.

In the hope of filling in a missing link for experimental psychologists' research on reading, this paper provides a general review of research on the issue of orthography and its relation to reading. The traditional classification of logographic, syllabic, and alphabetic modes are examined to see how much orthographic variations affect the processing strategy of both beginning and fluent readers. The examination leads to the hypothesis that different cognitive strategies are required to achieve reading efficiency in various writing systems. Issues connected with this hypothesis have been examined by cognitive psychologists, anthropologists, and neurolinguists. Those issues having to do particularly with bilingual literacy are reviewed: (1) reading disability incidence in syllabic and logographic systems compared with alphabetic systems, (2) neuropsychological research, (3) differential processing mechanisms and behavior consequences, (4) the process in reading of recoding the visual input into a speech-like code, and (5) bilingual processing. The research reviewed shows that reading skills acquired in one orthography may not be the same as those acquired in another orthography if these two systems have different script-speech mapping rules. These findings raise questions regarding bilingual reading instruction. (AMH)