Written Language & Literacy - Volume 24, Issue 1, 2021

The present study examines unintentional spelling errors on past participles produced by Flemish teenagers in private online writing. Previous psycholinguistic research on verb spelling errors in Dutch mainly focused on identical homophones (Bosman 2005; Frisson & Sandra 2002; Sandra et al. 1999). The present study, however, deals with past participles that are only partially homophonous with other forms in the inflectional paradigm and investigates whether the spelling of these verbs is affected by whole-word frequency, paradigmatic and bigram support for the correct spelling and the token frequency of the past participles’ morphological family. The error rates reflect the effect of both paradigmatic and bigram support. Moreover, the unique database makes it possible to analyze the impact of three social factors (Gender, Educational track and Age). Our results reveal an effect on the error rates of all social variables. Finally, these social factors do not interact with paradigmatic and bigram support.

Can a lack of grammatical knowledge alone be held accountable for the spelling errors that are made for homophonous verb forms and do these errors occur because spellers do not apply their grammatical knowledge? Three experiments with secondary school pupils were conducted on Dutch weak prefix verbs. The results confirmed that pupils made many spelling errors and also have great problems identifying the verb forms’ functions. Moreover, a direct correlation was revealed between a pupil’s identification of the form’s grammatical function and its spelling. These results indicate that many errors result from pupils’ inability to determine the grammatical functions of the forms. If pupils know the form’s function, they are more likely to also spell the form correctly. If they do not, they often choose the form’s homophone, especially if the homophone is more frequent than the target form. Spelling education thus needs a strong grammatical basis.

Although French plural spelling has been studied extensively, the complexity of factors affecting the learning of French plural spelling are not yet fully explained, namely on the level of adjectival and verbal plural. This study investigates spelling profiles of French plural markers of 228 multilingual grade 5 pupils with French taught as a foreign language.

Three analyses on the learner performances of plural spelling in nouns, verbs and pre- and postnominal attributive adjectives were conducted (1) to detect the pupils’ spelling profiles of plural marking on the basis of the performances in the pretest, (2) to test the profiles against two psycholinguistic theories, and (3) to evaluate the impact of the training on each spelling profile in the posttest.

The first analysis confirms the existing literature that pupils’ learning of French plural is not random but ordered and emphasizes the role of the position for adjectives (pre- or postnominal) on correct plural spelling. The second analysis reveals the theoretical difficulties of predicting spelling of adjectival and verbal plural. The third analysis shows that strong and poor spellers both benefit from a morphosyntactic training and provides transparency and traceability of the learning trajectories.

Together, the descriptive analyses reveal clear patterns of intra-individual spelling profiles. They point to a need for further research in those areas that have empirically provided the most inconsistent results to date and that are not supported by the theories: verbs and adjectives.

This paper discusses the impact of several spelling changes in Croatian on the level of the literacy of native speakers. Since 1986, there have been five official recommendations for usage that pertain to five different orthographic manuals. This research focuses on three spelling points with considerable identity-related repercussions among the public and the media, which are sometimes named the spelling symbols of Croatian. A questionnaire-survey comprised of 36 tests was completed among 1063 students on a technical study programme each year for eight consecutive academic years. Eight generations of first-year undergraduates, who do not study language in an educational setting, have accepted the new spellings, contingent on a frequency principle. The more frequent a spelling variant occurs, the less the chance that the new spelling variant is accepted, and vice versa. Given the lack of established and enduring spelling norms, combined with ideological oppositions between the old and new spelling forms, students have been guided mainly by their capacity to write the most common form.

That “script follows religion” is well known. Missionary activities by Christian, Manichaean and Islamic, and Buddhist and Hindu proselytizers brought literacy, in alphabetic, abjadic, and abugidic scripts respectively, to previously non-literate communities in Europe, Asia and Africa, and South and Southeast Asia respectively. Judaism, however, did not proselytize; instead, it “wandered,” bringing Jewish communities throughout Europe and a good part of Asia, to lands that were already literate thanks to those earlier missionaries. Jewish languages emerged when diaspora communities adopted vernaculars altered on the basis of the culture-languages Hebrew and Aramaic. Such communities treasured their Hebrew and Aramaic literacies and often wrote the vernaculars using Hebrew script.

The Hebrew letters denote consonants only, but the Jewish languages usually have more than 22 consonants and a number of vowels. Medieval Hebrew scholars devised vowels marks, used almost exclusively in sacred texts, but most Jewish languages barely use them. Unlike the other missionary scripts, Hebrew-script orthographies were often influenced by the indigenous orthographies they encountered.

Exploring those influences needs an abbreviated account of the development of Hebrew orthography from its second-millennium bce forebears. A few examples follow of the adaptations of Hebrew script to Jewish languages, and various commonalities are found among such adaptations that probably emerged independently with little contact between speakers of the various languages. The question arises as to whether similar divergences and commonalities are found in other scripts spread in Scriptural contexts. That they are generally not reflects the difference between scripts arriving in non-literate versus literate surroundings.