MA student‌

BSS (Hons) Rhodes
Email: ncedomvelase2002@gmail.com

Research Interests: 

• Psycholinguistics
• Literacy

MSS thesis title:

Visual word recognition in isiXhosa: An eye-tracking study of adult readers

Supervisor: Tracy Bowles

My research investigates how adult readers of isiXhosa recognise written words during reading, with a focus on how different word-level features, such as word frequency, word length, and orthographic neighbours, influence visual word recognition.  While the effects of these variables are well-documented in Indo-European languages, they remain understudied in agglutinative languages such as isiXhosa, particularly when using real-time processing methods like eye-tracking. Given the agglutinative nature of isiXhosa, where words often contain multiple grammatical morphemes within a single orthographic unit, this study draws on morpheme-based models of word recognition to explore whether readers might process such words as whole units or through their constituent morphemes. The findings aim to provide new insights into reading processes in under-researched Southern Bantu languages like isiXhosa and to contribute to the development of more inclusive psycholinguistic models that reflect diverse language structures.

Last Modified: Mon, 06 Oct 2025 16:51:46 SAST