Orthography

Presented by:
Saman khan
Roll no.50
 Orthography
“The spelling system of a language.”

• It is important to distinguish between a language’s

orthography, its writing system (employing letters,
syllables or whole-word characters) and its script (the
character shapes it uses as in ‘Arabic script’, ‘Greek
script’)
• Alphabetic orthographies vary considerably. Some,
such as Arabic, represent consonants but do not
always display vowels

• Orthographies can also be characterised according to

how close the match is between graphemes (units of
writing) and phonemes.

• Spanish, for example, provides an example of a

transparent orthography, with a one-to-one
relationship between written forms and sounds.

• All its words can be interpreted using consistent

grapheme-phoneme correspondence (GPC) rules.
• English provides an example of an opaque orthography,
because it contains a mixture of:

 Words that can be spelt using GPC rules (e.g. clinic, practising);

 Words with the weak vowel /@/ represented by any one of the
five vowels;

 Words that can be spelt by analogy with other words (e.g. light,
rough);

 Words that are unique in their spellings (e.g. yacht, buoy) and
thus demand the kind of whole-word processing by an English
writer that we find in a logographic system like Chinese
• Children acquiring transparent orthographies such as
Spanish make faster initial progress than those acquiring
opaque ones such as English.

• There are even different patterns of dyslexia, with readers

of transparent orthographies manifesting problems of
speed while English dyslexics have problems of both speed
and accuracy.

• Despite this, adult Spanish readers appear to employ

whole-word processing as well as GPC rules.

• This finding accords with an interactive model of reading, in

which information is processed at several levels
simultaneously (feature, letter, letter order, word).
 ORTHOGRAPHIC CODING

“The ability to recognize written words purely by their form.”

• It is tested by asking subjects to determine which of two

potentially homophonous forms is an actual word (e.g. RAIN
vs RANE).
• By contrast, phonological coding is tested by asking subjects
to read aloud non-words.
• Evidence from monozygotic (same egg) twins suggests that
phonological coding ability is heritable whereas orthographic
coding ability is not.
Thank you.