The place of Turkish Orthography in cognitive psychology.

Psychology of Reading is one of the main branches of Cognitive Psychology concerned with the investigation of the mental processes involved in reading dating back to the turn of the century. Although many theoretical models have been proposed, a most influential one namely the dual-route model had the greatest impact on the scientific community (Coltheart, 1978). Put it simply, the model maintains that the mental processes involved in reading may either involve a process of translating written information into their pronunciation segments - the phonological route, or the reader directly maps the written information with a mental visual representation - the visual route. It is clear that the phonological route cannot be applied to words that do not have a reliable written to phonological translation (e.g. English word HAVE) and the visual route cannot be applied to words one has never seen before. In a similar vein the generalisability of the dual-route model could be questioned when different writing systems come into play. Could one read Chinese logographs using the phonological route? Would one ever need to read the very regular Turkish script using the visual route? Is there some universality in reading processes in different writing systems (the universal hypothesis; Baluch & Besner, 1991) or are there differences in mental reading processes depending on script peculiarities (the orthographic depth hypothesis; Frost, Katz & Bentin, 1987)? In this paper I will report the results of a series of experiments in which the role of Turkish orthography in resolving these two conflicting hypotheses has been investigated.