Robert Englebretson

An overview of IPA Braille: An updated tactile representation of the International Phonetic Alphabet

This article provides an overview of IPA Braille, revised and updated by Englebretson (2008) under the auspices of the International Council on English Braille (ICEB). After a brief introduction to braille as a writing system and a review of the disparate braille notations formerly used for phonetics, the author discusses the need for a single, up-to-date, linguistically-informed braille notation for the IPA. The author then outlines the rationale and procedures used in developing IPA Braille, and presents an appendix of the complete charts showing the braille equivalents for all symbols of the current IPA (revised to 2005). This article is relevant to phoneticians interested in applications of the IPA, linguists interested in writing systems, instructors who may have blind students enrolled in phonetics and linguistics courses, and especially to blind students and professionals needing access to a complete, updated braille IPA notation. The publication of the full braille charts in JIPA ensures that IPA Braille is available to the wider community of phoneticians and linguists, who typically do not have access to the literature from specialized braille publishing houses.

Orthographic units in the absence of visual processing: Evidence from sublexical structure in braille.

Reading relies on the recognition of units larger than single letters and smaller than whole words. Previous research has linked sublexical structures in reading to properties of the visual system, specifically on the parallel processing of letters that the visual system enables. But whether the visual system is essential for this to happen, or whether the recognition of sublexical structures may emerge by other means, is an open question. To address this question, we investigate braille, a writing system that relies exclusively on the tactile rather than the visual modality. We provide experimental evidence demonstrating that adult readers of (English) braille are sensitive to sublexical units. Contrary to prior assumptions in the braille research literature, we find strong evidence that braille readers do indeed access sublexical structure, namely the processing of multi-cell contractions as single orthographic units and the recognition of morphemes within morphologically-complex words. Therefore, we conclude that the recognition of sublexical structure is not exclusively tied to the visual system. However, our findings also suggest that there are aspects of morphological processing on which braille and print readers differ, and that these differences may, crucially, be related to reading using the tactile rather than the visual sensory modality.