The grapho-phonological system of written French: Statistical analysis and empirical validation

The grapho-phonological system of written French: Statistical analysis and empirical validation Marielle Lange Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, Universit6 Libre de BruxeUes Av. F.D. Roosevelt, 50 Bruxelles, Belgium, B 1050 Bruxelles mlange@ulb.ac.be Alain Content Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, Universit6 Libre de Bruxelles Av. F.D. Roosevelt, 50 Bruxelles, Belgium, B 1050 Bruxelles acontent@ulb.ac.be Abstract The processes through which readers evoke mental representations of phonological forms from print constitute a hotly debated and controversial issue in current psycholinguistics. In this paper we present a computational analysis of the grapho-phonological system of written French, and an empirical validation of some of the obtained descriptive statistics. The results provide direct evidence demonstrating that both grapheme frequency and grapheme entropy influence performance on pseudoword naming. We discuss the implications of those findings for current models of phonological coding in visual word recognition. Introduction One central characteristic of alphabetic writing systems is the existence of a direct mapping between letters or letter groups and phonemes. In most languages, although to a varying extent, the mapping from print to sound can be characterized as quasi-systematic (Plaut, McClelland, Seidenberg, & Patterson, 1996; Chater & Christiansen, 1998). Thus, descriptively, in addition to a large body of regularities (e.g. the grapheme CH in French regularly maps onto/~/), one generally observes isolated deviations (e.g. CH in CHAOS maps onto /k/)as well as ambiguities. In some cases but not always, these difficulties can be alleviated by considering higher order regularities such as local orthographic environment (e.g., C maps onto /k/ or/s/ as a function of the following letter), phonotactic and phonological constraints as well as morphological properties (Cf. PH in PHASE vs. SHEPHERD). One additional difficulty stems from the fact that the graphemes, the orthographic counterparts of phonemes, can consist either of single letters or of letter groups, as the previous examples illustrate. Psycholinguistic theories of visual word recognition have taken the quasi-systematicity of writing into account in two opposite ways. In one framework, generally known as dual-route theories (e.g. Coltheart, 1978; Coltheart, Curtis, Atkins, &Haller, 1993), it is assumed that dominant mapping regularities are abstracted to derive a tabulation of grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules, which may then be looked up to derive a pronunciation for any letter string. Because the rule table only captures the dominant regularities, it needs to be complemented by lexical knowledge to handle deviations and ambiguities (i.e., CHAOS, SHEPHERD). The opposite view, based on the parallel distributed processing framework, assumes that the whole set of grapho-phonological regularities is captured through differentially weighted associations between letter coding and phoneme coding units of varying sizes (Seidenberg & McClelland, 1989; Plaut, Seidenberg, McClelland & Patterson, 1996). These opposing theories have nourished an ongoing complex empirical debate for a number of years. This controversy constitutes one instance of a more general issue in cognitive science, which bears upon the proper explanation of rule- like behavior. Is the language user's capacity to exploit print-sound regularities, for instance to generate a plausible pronunciation for a new, unfamiliar string of letters, best explained by knowledge of …

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