Perhaps it's because Spanish is a relatively "shallow" orthography; i.e., its
letter-sound relationships are very regular, almost with one-to-one
phoneme-grapheme correspondence. It's likely that Spanish readers have
generally used a phonological representations mediating the graphemic
representation and the semantic representation. The activation of the
phonological representation would be likely to be disrupted by jumbled letter
order.
On the other hand, English is generally considered in the cognitive
psychological literature of reading as having a relatively "deep" othography;
i.e., the letter-sound relationships are relatively more irregular, and so
English readers tend not to use the phonological route exclusively to access
meanings but also use holistic visual images to activate word meanings.
Now, Chinese, seems to be among those languages with the "deepest" othography;
i.e., the phonological route is not a reliable route and visual
representations are associated with semantic representations rather than
mediated by a phonological inbetween representation (though there have been
debates about this in the cognitive literature; see Ovid Tseng, K.K. Leung and
others' for refs.). So, if the strokes (e.g., radicals) of Chinese characters
are jumbled but if the textual context is rich enough to support its meaning
construction, the interruption to comprehension might not be as pronounced;
but it'd be interesting to try out such an experiment.
It'd also be interesting to try out similar experiments in languages such as
Arabic, where usually the vowels are left out and only the consonants are
adequate for decoding in adult reading texts.
Best,
Angel
>===== Original Message From Rebeca Mejía Arauz <rebmejia@iteso.mx> =====
>Hi,
> I tried a short paragraph in Spanish and it didn´t seem to me as easy to
>read as in English, specially with long words.
>
>
>Rebeca Mejía Arauz
>Dpto. Estudios Socioculturales
>ITESO, Guadalajara, Mexico
>
Angel Lin, Ph.D.(Toronto)
Associate Professor
Department of English and Communication
City University of Hong Kong
Tat Chee Ave., Kowloon, Hong Kong
Fax: (852) 2788-8894; phone: (852) 2788-8122
E-mail: enangel@cityu.edu.hk
http://www.cityu.edu.hk/en/staff/angel/angel_p.html
http://www.tesl-hk.org
From 25 Aug to 31 Dec 2003 (on sabbatical leave in Singapore):
Dr. Angel Lin, Visiting Scholar
Rm. 2-02-26
Centre for Research in Pedagogy and Practice
National Institute of Education
1 Nanyang Walk, Singapore 637616
Tel: (65) 6790-6498 (H)
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