Written Language & Literacy - Volume 16, Issue 1, 2013

This paper proposes a way in which the semantographic/ phonographic dichotomy recognised as fundamental in logographic (or morphosyllabic) writing systems in East Asia, the ancient Middle East, and Mesoamerica can be systematised to transcend the very different scholarly traditions in each region in order to allow valid and more meaningful cross-linguistic comparisons. A totally functional analysis with a focus on synchronic words as they occur in texts, rather than a focus on the form of signs or their etymology, ignores such formal units as the frame or even the grapheme and recognises three main compositional levels — logogram, component, and element — and the strict application of the analysis reveals cases of a fourth level, superlogogram. The application of this approach allows characterisations of writing systems that reflect the meaningful combination of signs in context and reveals greater complexity in how words are written, such as in semantic+semantic combinations, than previous analyses have recognised. It is concluded, however, that a statistical application of the analysis is prevented, not because of differences in the writing systems, but primarily because of the fundamental typological differences of the represented languages themselves.

This paper reports a corpus study that addresses the question whether distributional patterns of certain letter strings are orthographic cues to stress in German word reading. For that purpose, the occurrence of stress patterns with a different number of final consonant letters as well as with specific word endings in disyllabic German noun lemmas were investigated. The findings indicate that distributional properties of word endings can serve as reliable orthographic cues to word stress in disyllabic nouns — irrespective of whether they are polymorphemic or simplex nouns. Likewise, the number of final consonant letters is a potential orthographic cue to word stress in disyllabic simplex nouns. Such orthographic cues to stress may be employed during phonological recoding of written words by skilled readers of German.

Phonics vs. whole-word instruction effects on spelling proficiency were investigated for Thai, an alphabetic script that represents tonemes orthographically. Errors made by a cross-sectional convenience sample of 128 children aged 6, 8, 10, and 12 years old and 25 adults were categorized by grapheme category (Consonants, Vowels, Tones) and type (Reversals, Additions, Substitutions, Deletions). Fewer spelling errors were made by phonics-taught children who showed consistently better performance as a function of age. An additional quadratic component for the whole-word group suggested a different developmental trend involving a plateau after 8 years of age. Consonant errors were most frequent (but decreased rapidly over age), followed by vowel then tone errors. Vowels and tones were more dispensable than consonants, regardless of age or instruction method, suggesting that consonants may be of particular importance in Thai spelling. This preliminary observational dataset on spelling in tone languages may have implications for educational policy in Thailand.

We report results of writing samples of six Emirati children aged four to four and a half years collected at monthly intervals over an eight month period (the kindergarten academic year). Three teachers and six parents were interviewed to triangulate the data that were collected in the classrooms. The grounded theory method was used to code and categorize the data, which were then compared with the literature on emergent writing. Findings of this longitudinal study revealed that few opportunities are provided at home and in kindergarten for the development of young children’s emergent writing in Arabic and revealed other issues related to bilingualism and diglossia. Recommendations are provided for policy makers, teachers, and parents that would accelerate the development of young children’s Arabic literacy, particularly emergent writing skills, in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Unger (2011) observes that Chinese characters do not observe a Zipfian distribution, and he uses this fact as evidence that Chinese characters do not represent words. He then goes on to suggest that they do not represent morphemes either. In this note I argue that Unger’s observation is neither new, nor is it necessary; and that, at least with respect to his claim about morphemes, it does not support the conclusion he wishes to make.