Written Language & Literacy - Volume 18, Issue 1, 2015

This research compares the time-course of the written production of bare nouns to that of noun phrases. French adults named pictures of objects either using or not using determiners. Resulting pauses and writing rates were analyzed in relation to word-orthographic frequency, syllabic length, and phoneme-to-grapheme consistency at the end of words. More specifically, we showed that the noun production process begins as soon the determiner production is initiated (word frequency effect on latencies, length and consistency effects on determiner writing rate) and continued during the course of the noun production. When the determiner was absent, the management of writing was different: the writer slowed the production speed, probably in order to realize the lexeme processing that s/he could not do in the absence of the determiner production time. These results provided further evidence that some form of parallel processing occurs in written word production and led us to sketch the time-course of the noun spelling in written denomination of a noun phrase.

Spoken and written French contrast in many ways. Our goal here is to show how later language development is profoundly impacted by experience with written language. More than 120 French-speakers/ writers, one group of children (mean age: 10;9) and two groups of adolescents (mean age: 12;7 and 15;2), participated in this study. Our analysis of noun phrases is inspired by the hypothesis of Preferred Argument Structure (Du Bois 1987) and examines referential cohesion in texts produced in contexts differing in modality (spoken – written) and text type (expository – narrative). Our aim is to demonstrate: (a) that spoken language production is governed by discursive constraints which control the flow of information; and (b) these discursive constraints differ for written and spoken production. Part of learning to become a literate user of French involves overcoming the discourse constraints governing spoken language production.

The study is premised on speech and writing relying on differently coordinated temporal frames of communication, aiming to pinpoint the conceptual and linguistic differences between spoken and written Hebrew narration. This is a case study presenting in-depth psycholinguistic analyses of the oral and written versions of a personal-experience story produced by the same adult narrator in Hebrew, taking into account discursive functions, discourse stance, linguistic expression, and information flow, processing, and cohesion. Findings of parallel spoken and written content units presenting the same narrative information point to the interface of the narrative genre with the spoken and written modalities, together with the mature cognitive, linguistic, and social skills and experience of adulthood. Both spoken and written personal-experience adult narrative versions have a non-personal, non-specific, detached stance, though the written units are more abstract and syntactically complex. Adult narrating skill encompasses both modalities, recruiting different devices for the expression of cohesion.

Differences in letter string processing between better and relatively poorer (average) spellers were examined. Forty undergraduate students completed a simultaneous orthographic matching task judging pairs of letter strings as same or different. Reading exposure, spelling, and reading habits were measured. Significant differences in reaction times, but not accuracy, were found between the two groups. When the groups were combined, a negative correlation was found between reaction time in the matching task and spelling ability. Taken together, these results suggest that unexpectedly poorer spellers tend to read words based on partial cues, while excellent spellers attend to entire words. Further, results indicate that processing partial vs. full cues may be a continuum, rather than a dichotomy, with even average spellers processing less than do excellent spellers. These results have implications for how unexpectedly poor spellers are defined in research and for the range of individuals who could improve their spelling by processing fuller cues.

Previous studies reveal that young Dutch children display a [t]-bias in the middle of words in pronunciation (e.g. van der Feest 2007; Kerkhoff 2007). First graders, however, display a 〈d〉-bias in the middle of words in their writings (Neijt & Schreuder 2007). The present study investigates children’s spelling and pronunciation of word medial d and t to examine this apparent contrast. It turned out that first graders started with a 〈t〉-bias in their spellings while later on they displayed a 〈d〉-bias. A similar development was found for pronunciation: Kindergartners displayed a [t]-bias, while second graders displayed a [d]-bias instead. Our explanation is that this change is caused by overgeneralization, due to differences between Dutch pronunciation and orthography. We conclude that the orthographic system, although learned later in life, affects children’s earlier acquired pronunciation.

This study examined the influence of implicit and explicit instruction for the acquisition of two types of Dutch spelling rules: a morphological and a phonological rule. A sample of 193 first grade, low- and high skilled spellers was assigned to an implicit-instruction, explicit-instruction, or control-group condition. The results showed that for both rules, students in the explicit condition made more progress than students in the control condition. For the morphological rule, students in the explicit condition had higher posttest scores on pseudo-words than students in the implicit condition. The effects of the three conditions were the same for low- and high-skilled spellers. Both low- and high-skilled spellers in the implicit and explicit condition did not fully generalize their knowledge of both rules to new and pseudo-words.

In the framework of the Modular Writing System Theory (Neef 2005a), two levels of representation are distinguished that are relevant for the analysis of phonographic writing systems. These levels are called graphematics and systematic orthography, respectively. In this text, we focus on the latter module. As a case study, we take into account the spelling potential of the German vowels [a] (lax) and [ɑ] (tense). For this purpose, we first discuss the graphematic properties of these two vowels which allows deriving their graphematic solution spaces that capture such spelling variants that are theoretically given in the writing system of German. Subsequently, we use the spelling potential of [a] and [ɑ] to investigate their distribution in the systematic orthography of German. In doing so, we formulate orthographic constraints that regulate the appearance of the spelling variants. These constraints are sensitive for different levels of the German vocabulary. Some of the constraints have already been found relevant for the spelling of other phonemes as well, while others are specific to the two sounds under consideration. This theoretical approach allows analyzing a much broader part of the vocabulary compared to other theories.

In the Huon Gulf area of Papua New Guinea, the indigenous language Jabêm was one of the languages of first contact for Lutheran German Missionaries, circa 1900. As a result, Jabêm became a language of the church and, later, a language of education. In both domains, written materials were commonly produced and generations of children were schooled in Jabêm rather than their own mother tongues. This paper discusses the relationship between Jabêm and Kala, an indigenous language spoken in six villages along the Huon Gulf Coast. Kala was without a standard orthography until recent collaborations between members of the communities and researchers from UBC Okanagan. This paper, therefore, also describes the development of the Kala standardized orthography and examines the distinct influences Jabêm has in both spoken and written domains. For instance, Jabêm’s role as a written authority retains positive connotation, which influenced the newly created Kala orthography.