Reading in Russian: A Language With Context-Dependent Mappings Between Orthography and Phonology

Abstract

Russian is an Indo-European language that uses Cyrillic alphabet to represent the sounds of language. The system of correspondences between orthography and phonology in Russian is distinct from languages studied to date. On one hand, the pronunciations of letters are unpredictable e.g. may have alternative pronunciations; on the other hand, the mappings between orthography and phonology are regular since all alternations may be described in terms of regular rules e.g. final devoicing. Therefore, the translation from orthography to phonology are fully context-dependent. The aim of the present study was to investigate what effect this unique feature of Russian has on skilled reading of monosyllabic words. Russian metrics for type and token predictability were estimated based on the sample of 50 000 words. The results of mixed modeling show that words containing potentially unpredictable sounds elicit longer naming times. The results are discussed in terms of existing models of word reading.