PSYC 340 Chapter Notes - Chapter 7: Kana, Ideogram, Phonological Deficit

• School: McGill University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 340
• Professor: Debra Ann Titone

Document Summary

Grapheme: a unit of written language that corresponds to a phoneme. There is much more variability in the structure of written languages than there is in spoken languages. Whereas all spoken languages utilize a basic distinction between consonants and vowels, there is no such common thread to the world"s written languages. In alphabetic scripts, the basic unit represented by a grapheme is essentially a phoneme. In idiographic (or logographic) languages like chinese, each symbol is equivalent to a morpheme. Our ability to read nonword on the one hand and irregular words on the other suggests the possibility of a dual-route model of naming. The classic dual-route model has two routes for turning words into sounds. There is a direct access, or lexical route, which is needed for irregular words. This must at least in some way involve a direct link between print and sound.