On the Relation Between Processing the Roman and the Cyrillic Alphabets: a Preliminary Analysis with Bi-Alphabetical Readers

Serbo-Croatian is read, to a greater or lesser degree depending on locale, in two alphabets, the Roman and the Cyrillic. While most letters are solely members of one or the other alphabet, some letters are shared and of these, some are ambiguous in that they are read differently in the two alphabets. The order in which the alphabets are acquired depends on geography: in the eastern part of the country the order is Cyrillic then Roman; in the western part of the country the order is Roman then Cyrillic. A series of six experiments is reported examining the relation, in processing terms, between the two alphabets. Evidence is presented for a processing asymmetry. Processing the letters of the first-acquired alphabet is more similar to processing the letters of the second-acquired alphabet than vice versa. Additionally, it is shown that searching for a letter in the other alphabet is faster than searching for a letter in the same alphabet, suggesting that alphabet categorization may precede letter identification. The results are discussed in terms of the general problem of operating with two separately used symbol systems.