Turoman Nora, Styles Suzy J
Department of Radiology, Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois (CHUV) and University of Lausanne (UniL), Rue du Bugnon 46, 1011 Lausanne, Switzerland.
Department of Clinical Neurosciences, Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois (CHUV) and University of Lausanne (UniL), Rue du Bugnon 46, 1011 Lausanne, Switzerland.
R Soc Open Sci. 2017 Sep 13;4(9):170882. doi: 10.1098/rsos.170882. eCollection 2017 Sep.
In three experiments, we asked whether diverse scripts contain interpretable information about the speech sounds they represent. When presented with a pair of unfamiliar letters, adult readers correctly guess which is /i/ (the 'ee' sound in 'feet'), and which is /u/ (the 'oo' sound in 'shoe') at rates higher than expected by chance, as shown in a large sample of Singaporean university students (Experiment 1) and replicated in a larger sample of international Internet users (Experiment 2). To uncover what properties of the letters contribute to different scripts' 'guessability,' we analysed the visual spatial frequencies in each letter (Experiment 3). We predicted that the lower spectral frequencies in the formants of the vowel /u/ would pattern with lower spatial frequencies in the corresponding letters. Instead, we found that across all spatial frequencies, the letter with more black/white cycles (i.e. more ink) was more likely to be guessed as /u/, and the larger the difference between the glyphs in a pair, the higher the script's guessability. We propose that diverse groups of humans across historical time and geographical space tend to employ similar iconic strategies for representing speech in visual form, and provide norms for letter pairs from 56 diverse scripts.
在三项实验中，我们探究了不同的文字系统是否包含有关它们所代表语音的可解释信息。当向成年读者展示一对不熟悉的字母时，他们能够正确猜出哪个是 /i/（如“feet”中的“ee”音），哪个是 /u/（如“shoe”中的“oo”音），其正确率高于随机猜测的预期，这在大量新加坡大学生样本中得到了验证（实验1），并在更大规模的国际互联网用户样本中得到了重复验证（实验2）。为了揭示字母的哪些属性导致不同文字系统具有不同的“可猜测性”，我们分析了每个字母的视觉空间频率（实验3）。我们预测元音 /u/ 的共振峰中较低的频谱频率会与相应字母中较低的空间频率相对应。然而，我们发现，在所有空间频率范围内，具有更多黑白循环（即墨水更多）的字母更有可能被猜测为 /u/，并且一对字形之间的差异越大，文字系统的可猜测性就越高。我们提出，在历史时间和地理空间中，不同群体的人类倾向于采用相似且具有代表性的策略，以视觉形式来呈现语音，并提供了来自56种不同文字系统的字母对规范。
