Cross-orthographic Stroop Research: One Study in Context
by Philippa Jane Benson
Overview
This paper reviews studies done during the last decade in one small area of cross-language research, that of cross-orthographic Stroop interference tests. By critiquing one of the first cross-orthographic Stroop studies in the context of related studies, this paper describes how cross-orthographic Stroop studies have been used to explore cognitive mechanisms involved in reading and explores the possibility that those mechanisms might be constrained by the orthography of a language. Stroop studies have been a useful tool for inquiry into possible differences in cognitive processing of visually distinct written languages in two particular ways. First, many studies have yielded provocative results indicating that different orthographies may indeed invoke different cognitive processes in readers. At the same time, these studies have contained conceptual and methodological flaws that underscore the difficulty in empirically verifying hypotheses about how humans make meaning from and with written language. In essence, the studies themselves warn that, until our understanding of language processing is more complete, we should take their results with a sizable pinch of salt. Despite their faults, however, these studies do provide evidence that readers of different orthographies may invoke different cognitive processes at the base of their reading strategies.
The Composing Process of a Bilingual Novice Writer
by Philippa Jane Benson
(An earlier version of this paper was presented at the session on Applied Psycholinguistics of the Second Annual Northeast Conference on Chinese Linguistics held at the University of Pennsylvania, May 4, 1990.)
Introduction
Research over the past decade has produced some understanding of the relationship between the cognitive patterns of two types of readers and writers: those who use languages that employ phonetically-based alphabetic writing systems (e.g., English) and those who use languages that employ ideographic writing systems (e.g., Chinese). However, the emerging picture is still incomplete; although we have learned enonnous amounts about how readers decode and encode alphabetic and ideographic scripts, we can say little about the similarities and/or differences in the processes engaged by users of different scripts as they produce and revise written texts. Yet, it seems clear that if we persist in our explorations, we can bring more precise elements of the relationships into focus, and perhaps in turn move closer to understanding the kinship between language and thought.