Measuring the complexity of writing systems*

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Abstract
We propose a quantitative operationalisation of the complexity of a writing system. This complexity, also referred to as orthographic depth, plays a crucial role in psycholinguistic modelling 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 three different data‐oriented learning algorithms, 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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