The influence of phonotactics on oral reading in Russian

Abstract

This PhD research investigates the role of phonotactics in oral reading from theoretical, empirical and computational perspectives, none of which has been undertaken to date. On the theoretical side, I begin laying the groundwork for the study of phonotactic influence in reading: I explain why phonotactics may be an important factor for oral reading, propose criteria for identification of phonotactic constraints in a language, and devise a method to study phonotactic effects in reading - via a metric that measures the dependence of a phoneme on phonotactic constraints (phonotactic dependency). On the empirical side, I report a pioneering experimental investigation regarding phonotactic influences in skilled and beginner readers of the Russian language that yield evidence supporting its influence on oral reading. The implications for theories that assume that properties of an orthography shape the way humans read or acquire reading (the Orthographic Depth Hypothesis, the Psycholinguistic Grain Size Theory) are discussed. Lastly, I examine oral reading in Russian from a computational standpoint - through the implementation of the Russian versions of the dual-route cascaded (DRC) and the connectionist dual-process (CDP++) models of reading aloud and testing them against human word and nonword reading data, with a particular focus on phonotactic dependency effects.