Written Language & Literacy - Volume 20, Issue 2, 2017

The present study examined spell checker software for both spelling recognition and production among college students. Sixty-four participants identified and corrected spelling in a prewritten story and produced spelling by writing a story. Both were completed with or without spell checker access. Results demonstrated differences between the performance of good and poor spellers (as defined using a baseline spelling test). When compared to good spellers, poor spellers corrected a greater percentage of spelling errors with spell checker than without. Spell checker helped all participants produce fewer spelling errors, but not fewer homophone errors. Additionally, more often than good spellers, poor spellers reported placing less effort into spelling words correctly when using spell checker. These findings suggest that poor spellers may have a greater need for spell checker than good spellers, and may be at a greater risk for relying on the software as the only step in the proofreading process.

We examined the instability of reading errors, that is whether a child reads the same word sometimes correctly and sometimes incorrectly, and whether typical readers differ in their instability from poor readers. With an interval of a few days, Dutch CVC words were read twice by typically developing first and second graders and reading-level matched poor readers. Error instability was considerable and second graders produced more unstable errors than first graders. Poor readers did not differ from typical readers, suggesting a developmental lag for poor readers. Of the word characteristics studied, frequency was the strongest predictor: the higher word frequency, the higher error instability. Our study indicates that error instability can be considered as an indicator of the transition from incompetence to reading competence.

Attentional and action control are two levels of executive control that are essential to early reading development. Together these levels enable the construction and monitoring of cognitive representations and of efficient task-behavior, which are both necessary to benefit from reading instruction. The longitudinal and unique contributions of this internal and external level of executive control to early reading are still unclear. We therefore examined how these control capacities facilitate reading development from kindergarten to second-grade. Attentional and action control and multiple early reading skills were assessed at all three time points. Structural Equation Modeling showed a mediation effect for attentional control and an indirect effect for action control to subsequent reading skills via the contributions to the precursor of phonological awareness. From these results it can be concluded that both types uniquely allowed for the emergence of kindergarten preliteracy skills, which in turn provided children with a better starting point for reading development in first- and second-grade.

This paper reports on a computational simulation of the evolution of early writing systems from pre-linguistic symbol systems, something for which there is poor evidence in the archaeological record. The simulation starts with a completely concept-based set of symbols, and then spreads those symbols and combinations of these to morphemes of artificially generated languages based on semantic and phonetic similarity.

While the simulation is crude, it is able to account for the observation that the development of writing systems ex nihilo seems to be facilitated in languages that have largely monosyllabic morphemes, or that have abundant ablauting processes. We are also able to model what appears to be two possible lines of development in early writing whereby symbols are associated to the sounds of all morphemes linked to a concept (as seems to have been the case in Sumerian), versus just one morpheme linked to a concept (as seems to have been the case in Chinese). Finally, the model is able to offer an account of the apparent rapid development of writing in Mesopotamia that obviates the need to posit a conscious invention of writing, as proposed by Glassner.

The proposed model thus opens a new approach to thinking about the emergence of writing and its properties, something that, as noted above, has scant direct archaeological evidence.

The software is released open-source on GitHub.

Orthographic complexity in Thai is traced diachronically to account for non-linear relationships in the current writing system. As a result of orthographic conservatism over a period of phonological change, an earlier direct phoneme-grapheme isomorphism has shifted to a complex configuration with abstract reinterpretation. What were originally segmental graphemes have acquired hierarchical functions in suprasegmental tone marking. However, aspects of this account have been challenged. A debate has arisen regarding the origins of Thai writing. An early inscription with consistent use of tone marks has been deemed a fake, causing a local uproar. This inscriptional debate is described in some detail as it provides a context appropriate for examining more general questions raised by Share & Daniels (2016) and others regarding multi-dimensional hierarchical depth in orthographic systems. Central to Thai orthographic depth is the claim that early Thai writers marked phonemic tone.