Читать книгу The Science of Reading - Группа авторов - Страница 84

Visual symbols in alphabetic writing systems are used to represent the sounds of language. Thus, printed words such as dig, dog, and dip that look similar also tend to sound similar, and yet they have very different meanings. Indeed, if we consider only the stems within an alphabetic writing system, we see that the relationship between spelling and sound is largely systematic (similar spellings yield similar sounds) and the relationship between spelling and meaning is largely arbitrary (similar spellings yield unrelated meanings).¹ This dichotomy provides a theoretical basis for research focused on how readers (learn to) transform visual symbols back into sounds during reading. However, the situation changes substantially when we consider words built from multiple morphemes (Plaut & Gonnerman, 2000), including words with inflections (e.g., spells, spelled, spelling), derivations (e.g., misspell, speller), and compounds (e.g., spellcheck, spellbound). In these cases, stems occur in words with similar meanings (e.g., lucky, un lucky, luckily), and affixes alter the meanings of words in highly predictable ways (e.g., repaint, relock, reload). Morphemes therefore provide “islands of regularity” in an otherwise arbitrary mapping between spellings and meanings (Rastle, Davis, Marslen‐Wilson, & Tyler, 2000).

Morphemes differ in the consistency with which they link spellings to meanings. Stems can occur in morphologically structured words in ways that do not convey the morphemes’ combined meanings. For example, the combinatorial meaning of the word whisker is “someone who whisks,” yet the word is almost always used to refer to a long hair growing from the face of a mammal, or infrequently, to a very tiny amount (e.g., she won the race by a whisker). Likewise, while some affixes are highly consistent across all words in which they occur (e.g., ‐ness virtually always transforms an adjective to a noun), others are not (e.g., ‐age in vicarage, postage, and bandage). Even where morphologically complex words are consistently related to the meanings of their stems, the specific way that affixes transform the meanings of stems can vary. For example, while the words snowman, patrolman, and milkman are all men (of sorts), the ‐man component functions quite differently in each word: a snowman is a man made of snow, but a milkman is not made of milk; a patrolman patrols, but a snowman does not snow.

These examples suggest that the regularity that morphology brings to the spelling‐meaning mapping is graded rather than all‐or‐none. However, research has only recently begun to quantify the nature of this regularity. Emerging research has revealed a striking relationship between English suffixes and grammatical category, with most suffixes being highly diagnostic of this aspect of meaning (Ulicheva et al., 2020). For example, the suffix ‐ous virtually always denotes adjective status (e.g., nervous, envious, glamorous), and adjectives ending in the sound sequence /Əs/ must be spelled ‐ous (see also Berg & Aronoff, 2017). The sound sequence /Əs/ is virtually always spelled another way if the word is not an adjective (e.g., service, princess, haggis). This relationship means that a superficial inspection of a suffixed English word already reveals an important aspect of its meaning: whether it is an object, property, or act.

Intriguingly, at least in English, it seems that regularity between spelling and sound is sacrificed to express these powerful regularities between spelling and meaning. If English spelling offered a perfect transcription of the sounds of words, then one might spell the words busted, snored, and kicked as bustid, snord, and kict (Rastle, 2019a). Yet, the spelling system admits spelling‐sound inconsistency (i.e., the spelling ‐ed can be pronounced in many ways) in order to transmit an important piece of information about meaning (i.e., the spelling ‐ed indicates the past). This trade‐off is ubiquitous in English spelling (Ulicheva et al., 2020), and means that meaningful morphological information is highly visible, significantly more than in spoken English (Rastle, 2019a; Ulicheva et al., 2020). Further analyses are required to quantify the strength of the relationship between spelling and meaning in other languages.