Leading-edge Research or Lost Cause: The Search for Interscriptual Stroop Effects

Abstract

This paper reviews studies done during the last decade in one small area of cross-language research, that of cross-orthographic Stroop interference tests. Although these studies may at first seem distant to discussions of basic literacy skills, the insights they provide may be critical to furthering our understanding of human acquisition and use of written language. The purpose of this article is two-fold. First, by critiquing one of the first cross-orthographic Stroop studies in the context of related studies, this paper describes how cross-orthographic Stroop studies have been used to explore cognitive mechanisms involved in reading and the possibility that those mechanisms might be constrained by the orthography of a language. Second, this paper reviews some conceptual and methodical flaws in the research, flaws that underscore the difficulty in empirically verifying hypotheses about how humans might make meaning from and with written language. As debates intensify about the role of empirical studies in research on written language, it becomes increasingly important that researchers relying on empirical methods increase their efforts to weed their experimental designs of potential rival hypotheses. This weeding is particularly difficult in cross-language studies because investigators are often hampered by a lack of sufficient knowledge about the languages they are using as experimental materials. Despite their faults, however, the studies reviewed here, along with others, provide evidence that readers of different orthographies may invoke different cognitive processes at the base of their reading strategies.