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 / ə / 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).
See also: Grapheme-phoneme correspondence rule, Graphotactic rules, Writing system
Further reading: Coulmas (1989); Harris and Coltheart (1986); Rayner and Pollatsek (1989: Chap. 2)
