ABSTRACT
The Serbo-Croatian language is written in two alphabets and its orthography is phonologically shallow; the grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences are simple and direct in both the Roman and Cyrillic alphabets. Results of a series of experiments that exploit the special properties of the Serbo-Croatian writing systems indicate that in word recognition, skilled readers access the lexicon in a manner that must include an analysis of phonological components. This evidence for a phonological recognition strategy in Serbo-Croatian is not subject to the same criticisms as the evidence in English: (1) more consistent phonological effects have been demonstrated with words than with pseudowords; (2) the Cyrillic form of a word and the Roman form of that same word form the basis for comparison, and these forms are necessarily equivalent both in terms of orthographic regularity and the reliability of grapheme–phoneme correspondences. In summary, interpretation of the data suggests that a phonological recognition strategy in Serbo-Croatian is not optional.
