Written Language & Literacy - Volume 15, Issue 2, 2012

This paper examines the claim that writing turns the implicit properties of spoken language into visible objects suited to reflection and analysis. It examines this hypothesis through an analysis of relational terms including ‘and’, ‘or’, and ‘not’, their meanings and uses in ordinary conversational contexts, and the changes that occur when these terms are recruited for systematic logical thinking. Keywords: literate rationality; literacy hypothesis; written register; relational term; logical thinking; logical discourse; metalinguistic judgement

Although metalinguistic (‘offline’) awareness of words as linguistic units has been related to literacy, it is still uncertain whether literacy also affects the units of language that people process unconsciously (‘online’). In this contribution, we first discuss the characteristics of offline and online tasks, opening up the perspective that such tasks vary in nature along a continuum ranging from more offline to more online. Subsequently, we present a study employing three relatively more offline and two more online tasks which we conducted among 83 preliterate and 121 literate children at Dutch primary schools. The results of the more offline tasks reveal a significant influence of literacy on segmentation along word-boundaries, while the results from the relatively more online tasks are less clear-cut with respect to the way in which literacy affects language processing. Keywords: literacy; language acquisition; metalinguistic awareness; online and offline task; word-segmentation; language processing; developmental psycholinguistics; Dutch

The present study investigates linguistic relativity. The units of writing investigated are e and en, which are used to represent units of language in Dutch, Frisian, and Afrikaans. Dutch has homographic forms in the plural suffix -en and the linking element of noun-noun compounds en. Frisian does not have homography of this kind, while Afrikaans has a different homography. This raises the question whether second language learners of Dutch consistently interpret the linking en in Dutch noun-noun compounds as plural in the way that native speakers do. Plurality ratings for Dutch modifiers obtained from native Dutch speakers are compared with ratings from Frisian-Dutch bilinguals and Afrikaaners learning Dutch as L2. Significant differences relating to orthography are observed. We therefore argue that differing orthographic conventions in one’s native language (L1) can lead to different interpretations for the same everyday words written in Dutch (L2). Orthography thus provides an example of linguistic relativity. Keywords: linguistic relativity; second language learning; morphology; compounding; linking element; plurality; homography; Dutch; Frisian; Afrikaans

Formal theories of phonographic writing systems have to model, among other things, the regularities in the correspondences between written forms and phonological representations. In the ‘Recoding Model of Graphematics’ (Neef 2005a), correspondence rules for individual letters, supplemented with a set of constraints, serve this task. The aim of this paper is to argue that beyond these basic units, the morphological structure of written words plays a role in theories of phonographic writing systems as well. The relevant aspect of morphological structure is captured in a framework based on the boundary of the potential beginning of a word, which is motivated and evaluated on the basis of a detailed analysis of data from German. Keywords: graphematics; phonographic writing systems; letter; correspondence rule; graphematic domain; graphematic boundary; graphematic word; morphological structure

Some orthographies represent tone phonemically by means of diacritics; others favor zero marking. Neither solution is entirely satisfactory. The former leads to graphic overload; the latter to a profusion of homographs; both may reduce fluency. But there is a ‘third way’: to highlight the grammar rather than the tone system itself. To test this approach, we developed two experimental strategies for Kabiye: a grammar orthography and a tone orthography. Both are modifications of the standard orthography that does not mark tone. We tested these in a quantitative experiment involving literate L1 speakers that included dictation and spontaneous writing. Writers of the grammar orthography perform faster and more accurately than writers of the tone orthography, suggesting that they have an awareness of the morphological and syntactic structure of their language that may exceed their awareness of its phonology. This suggests that languages with grammatical tone might benefit from grammatical markers in the orthography. Keywords: tone; grammar; orthography; African languages; quantitative experiment

Given its multi-scriptal nature, the Japanese writing system can potentially yield some important insights into the complex relationships that can exist between units of language and units of writing. This paper discusses some of the difficult issues surrounding the notions of orthographic representation and variation within the Japanese writing system, as seen from the perspective of creating word lists based on the Kokuritsu Kokugo Kenkyūjo’s ‘Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese’ (BCCWJ) Project. More specifically, the paper (i) reflects on the treatment of lemmas within UniDic, the morphological analyzer dictionary developed for the project, (ii) notes some concerns for extracting word lists that stem from the project’s approach towards defining orthographic words which draws on its conceptualization of short and long unit words, and (iii) attempts to quantify the extent of orthographic variation within the Japanese writing system as represented by the BCCWJ. Keywords: Japanese; Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese (BCCWJ); kanji; hiragana; katakana; orthographic variation; UniDic