The Orthographic Depth Hypothesis (Katz and Feldman, 1983) posits that different reading routes are engageddepending on the expertise of the reader but also on the type of grapheme/phoneme correspondence of the languagebeing read. Shallow orthographies (e.g. German and Italian) with consistent grapheme to phoneme correspondencesfavor encoding via non-lexical pathways, where each phoneme is sequentially mapped to its correspondinggrapheme. In contrast, deep orthographies (e.g. French and English), with inconsistent grapheme to phonemecorrespondences favor lexical pathways, where phonemes are retrieved from memory structures. Only few studiesinvestigated the impact of orthographic depth on brain response while reading. Moreover, because they usedbetween subject or cross-language designs, the interpretability of previous studies on the effect of orthographicdepth is limited. The aim of the present study was to investigate the impact of orthographic depth on reading routeselection using an experimental design enabling isolating the effect of orthographic depth.
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