Model for phonemic awareness in readers of Indian script

Previous studies have shown that segmental awareness tasks are usually influenced by the script. In this paper, we extend these studies further to propose a more concrete, script-centric metric for evaluating phonemic awareness in readers of Indian scripts. We propose that the ease or difficulty with which syllabic and phonemic segmental tasks are performed is directly proportional to the editing operations involved in applying the same task on the graphic form of the stimulus. We also present a computational model that calculates visual edit distances and uses these to determine if the phonemic task on any given word is easy or difficult. Finally, we tested the predictions of our model using Tamil data.