effet du nombre des graphèmes en Anglais - Aix Marseille Université

226Appendice Ilanguages (French, German, and English), and indirectly encompasses Dutch, Spanish, and Italian via scientificcollaborations.Orthographic-phonological processing is well-suited to illustrate the benefits of both multilinguistic research(Frost et al., 1987) and model-guided multitask research (Grainger & Jacobs, 1996). Well-plannedcombinations of multilinguistic and multitask research could quickly advance our understanding of the constraintsinvolved in reading (Jacobs, 1995 ; Ziegler, 1996). Under the optimality assumption 3 , would weexpect that users of English orthography develop the same reading strategies (and the underlying representationsand processes) as users of French or German? Consider some recent descriptive, statistical data onspelling-to-sound and sound-to-spelling consistency for English and French (Stone, Vanhoy, & Van Orden,1997 ; Ziegler, Jacobs, & Stone, 1996 ; Ziegler, Stone, & Jacobs, in press a). These authors estimated thatabout 72% of all English monosyllabic words are feedback inconsistent (i.e., their phonologic bodies can bespelled in multiple ways) whereas about 31% are feedforward inconsistent (i.e., their spelling body has morethan one pronunciation). In comparison, about 79% of all monosyllabic French words are feedback inconsistentwhereas only 12% are feedforward inconsistent. Given this data, could we expect that users of Englishand French both have problems in tasks that require a solid spelling knowledge (e.g., proof reading or LDT),but that users of French have less problems in naming tasks than users of English. What about users of"shallow" orthographies, such as German ? Do users of German fare well regardless of task demands ? If so,they could serve as a control group for comparison with the performance of the two other populations, makingthe estimation of language-dependent effect sizes possible (Jacobs, 1995 ; Ziegler, 1996).Lex i calDeci s i onWordRecognition?PerceptualIdentificationNamingFigure 1. Venn diagram illustrating the concept of functional overlap (for details see Grainger & Jacobs, 1996 ;Jacobs, 1994 ; Jacobs & Grainger, 1994).We are also skeptical about the view that the reading process can be understood by using a single experimentalparadigm. Surely, different reading tasks (e.g., LDT, naming task, perceptual identification task)capture some identical and some different aspects of the reading process. However, there is no model-freeway to determine which of those aspects are relevant to an understanding of the reading process, and whichare purely task-specific. Pursuing our stratagem of modeling functional overlap illustrated in Figure 1(Grainger & Jacobs, 1996 ; Jacobs, 1994 ; Jacobs & Grainger, 1994), in the present paper we attempt togain a better understanding of phonological processes that may be common to silent reading and readingaloud, as assessed by the LDT, perceptual identification and naming task.Finally, we are skeptical about the view that reading can be fully understood by viewing it as a one-wayprocess, which exclusively proceeds from print to sound. In practice, this classical view has led to a separationof models, methods, factors (variables), and effects stressing either orthographic or phonological aspects.An example is the separation of experimental psychologists in an "orthographic" and a "phonologicalcamp". For example, the orthographic camp prefers the LDT, orthographic variables (e.g., measures of orthographicneighborhood), and models that focus on the explanation of orthographic effects. In contrast, thephonological camp favors the naming task, phonological variables (e.g., consistency measures), and modelsthat focus on the explanation of phonological effects (see recent special section of the Journal of ExperimentalPsychology : Human Perception and Performance, 1994, on modeling visual word recognition). If the3 Regardless of the reasons for the variability in the spelling-to-sound and sound-to-spelling mappings, evolutionaryperspectives of cognitive psychology (e.g. Anderson, 1990 ; Shepard, 1994) must start with thepremise that users of variable linguistic environments optimally adapt(ed) to their corresponding orthography-to-phonologyand phonology-to-orthography mappings. Such an optimality assumption facilitatesformal analyses (Massaro & Friedman, 1990), which are applied here to the domain of orthographic andphonological processing in different tasks and languages.