Orthographic depth at two scales, with English also matched for lexicon size
Adam Y. Shavit
原文摘要
A reader can struggle to read in only one of their languages, and one proposed reason is how predictably spelling maps to sound. We measure that predictability as conditional entropy, the pronunciation uncertainty left once the spelling is seen, at two grain sizes (unit sizes): the alignment unit, an aligned spelling-sound chunk, and the syllable, bounded in the pronunciation. We analyse word lists in twelve alphabetic orthographies and report five in full, with English pronunciations from a dictionary and the rest from the synthesizer eSpeak-ng, length marks removed. Among the five, English has the most uncertainty and Finnish the least at both grains. Across all twelve, Portuguese and Danish exceed English per alignment unit, and German and Italian order differently by grain and transcription. These orders hold when English is transcribed by eSpeak-ng with u allowed to spell /j/ plus a vowel. Uncertainty per unit has no shared direction as units grow: it falls in Spanish and, less securely, German, is level in Finnish, depends on transcription in Italian and on the word list in English, and rises in Norwegian and Swedish. Summed uncertainty per word falls in all twelve, but that score is handed the pronunciation's boundaries and mixes context with in-sample memorisation, so it is no evidence of what a reader computes. An exact identity states when discarded spelling boundaries could reverse that fall. A uniform 20,000-word English sample holds 35% of the dictionary's syllable spellings and has syllable entropy 0.098 bits lower, so lexicons must be matched in size. In an exploratory check over eleven languages, syllable-scale entropy tracked first-year reading accuracy (rho = -0.74, falling to -0.25 if English is given the lowest entropy instead), without separating the syllable scale from the alignment unit. These estimates describe sampled writing systems, not readers.
stat.AP · cs.CL · q-bio.NC · stat.ME