David L. Share
Department of Learning Disabilities, Faculty of Education and Edmond J. Safra Brain Research Center for the Study of Learning Disabilities, University of Haifa
David Share received his PhD in Education and Psychology from Deakin University, Australia. His field of research is the early development of reading with an emphasis on variation between children in reading ability and special attention to reading difficulties (dyslexia) and, more recently, the role of writing system variation in early reading acquisition. He is currently ranked among the Top 100 education researchers worldwide.
What makes a writing system efficient for the reader?
To meet the reader's needs, an efficient writing system must have both decipherability/ learnability (via phonological transparency) for the novice, and unitizability/automatizability (via morphemic transparency) for the skilled-reader-to-be (Share, 2008, in press). Because every printed word is, at one point, unfamiliar, the reader must possess some means of independently identifying units of meaning (words and morphemes) encountered for the first time. Like spoken language, a writing system, must therefore be "combinatorial" (Hockett, 1960), combining and recombining a limited, and hence learnable number of sub-lexical elements (letters, syllabic or sub-syllabic units, morphograms) that enable the reader to identify (decipher) any possible word. In addition, the reader must eventually achieve a high degree of unitization or "chunking" either of letter strings, aksharas, stroke combinations or character compounds to enable rapid, near-effortless, holistic/parallel recognition of familiar words and morphemes. This requires that separate morphemes have distinct visual forms with uniform or near-uniform spellings across inflections, derivations, and compounding, enabling the skilled reader to establish unique word- and morpheme-specific orthography-to-meaning connections that make rapid “direct” word recognition possible. I outline how this decipherability/unitizability (“novice-to-expert”) dualism plays out in the five types of writing systems.
