ORTHOGRAPHIC VISUAL COMPLEXITY AND SPEECH DURATION: A PIXEL-FOCUSED ANALYSIS

Abstract

Written language was once believed to be an entirely separate function from spoken language, as they are processed in two distinct regions of the brain; however, psycholinguistic research has now begun to uncover the link between the two. Research in the field indicates that orthographic features such as the number of characters that comprise a word have a positive effect on the speech duration of that word. Building on this, the idea of visual complexity also plays a role in how we process and produce language. This paper provides an analysis of two tasks, each originally a part of a study to determine which orthographic features affect speech production. The analyses in this paper focus on the pixel composition, an aspect of visual complexity, of the orthography and images used to teach participants an alien language. The results of these analyses are considered in the context of two prevailing hypotheses, the on-line activation hypothesis and the phonological restructuring hypothesis, regarding when and how orthography interacts with spoken language psychologically.