“Measuring the Complexity of Writing Systems”, 1994-09-20 ():
We propose a quantitative operationalization of the complexity of a writing system. This complexity, also referred to as orthographic depth, plays a crucial role in psycholinguistic modeling of reading aloud (and learning to read aloud) in several languages.
The complexity of a writing system is expressed by two measures, viz. that of the complexity of letter-phoneme alignment and that of the complexity of grapheme-phoneme correspondences.
We present the alignment problem and the correspondence problem as tasks to 3 different data-oriented learning algorithms [tree-learning], and submit them to English, French and Dutch learning and testing material.
Generalisation performance metrics are used to propose for each corpus a two-dimensional writing system complexity value.
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