Written Language & Literacy - Volume 7, Issue 1, 2004

This paper reports on the results of a research project in psycholinguistics that studied indigenous Maya children in a town in south-eastern Mexico. On requesting the children (who have scarce formal instruction in Spanish literacy) to write a list of words in their native language (Mayan) and in a second language (Spanish), we discovered a series of graphic and phonological strategies the children use to distinguish between writing in their native language and in Spanish. Maya children work simultaneously on two levels of graphic differentiation. On one hand, they attempt to respect the formal principles of a writing system when writing in Mayan, and in this sense they try to guarantee that their language is written just as any other language (making evident the need to use a graphic system in Mayan). On the other hand, they use unique graphic resources different from those used in Spanish, in an attempt to show that their native language has graphic particularities that distinguish it from other written languages.

In an experimental study we explored the role of word frequency and orthographic constraints in the reading of Dutch bisyllabic words. Although Dutch orthography is highly regular, several deviations from a one-to-one correspondence occur. In polysyllabic words, the grapheme E may represent three different vowels: /ε /, /e/, or /œ /. In the experiment, skilled adult readers were presented lists of bisyllabic words containing the vowel E in the initial syllable and the same grapheme or another vowel in the second syllable. We expected word frequency to be related to word latency scores. On the basis of general word frequency data, we also expected the interpretation of the initial syllable as a stressed /e/ to be facilitated as compared to the interpretation of an unstressed /œ /. We found a strong negative correlation between word frequency and latency scores. Moreover, for words with E in either syllable we found a preference for a stressed /e/ interpretation, indicating a lexical frequency effect. The results are discussed with reference to a parallel dual-route model of word decoding.

We review some of our research findings on verb spelling errors in Dutch. The spelling of Dutch regularly inflected verb forms is governed by rules of the simple concatenative type (stem + suffix). The spelling of a subset of these verb forms is determined by morpheme-based analogy, both at the level of the stem-final letter and at the level of the inaudible (i.e., silent) suffix. This subset of verb forms causes many spelling problems, both in the learning stage and in the spelling process of experienced spellers. Our research identifies two sources of these errors. First, the error risk results from the time-consuming nature of the cognitive operations needed for spelling the silent suffix. Second, the errors follow a particular pattern: the typical error is a homophonic verb spelling form which has a higher frequency of occurrence in the Dutch written language than the target form. This homophone frequency effect shows that regularly inflected verb forms with silent suffixes have their own orthographic representation in the mental lexicon, even though they are fully predictable by rule.

The present study examines the complex interactions between the spoken and the written language in twenty Funish children’s oral and written narratives and a read out task. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses were conducted. First, a comparison of the distribution of the reduction phenomena in the children’s language across the two spoken conditions was made. The second analysis looked at the distribution of spelling errors in the written narratives with respect to sound and reduction related errors both at a general and individual level. Finally, a qualitative analysis of three children’s distribution of the large weak class was performed to evaluate a possible interaction between the children’s three registers: spontaneous speech, reading and writing. The results indicated that (a) there was a significant difference in the distribution of forms across the two spoken modalities, e.g. schwa-assimilations and schwa-drop and Funish forms occurred less in the read out condition than in the spoken narratives; (b) spelling errors were predominately sound related and could be explained as either related to the opaque phoneme to grapheme relation in Danish or to reduction phenomena in the children’s own language; (c) furthermore, there was a significant correlation between spelling errors and a high frequency of reduced forms in the read out condition indicating a close relation between these two modalities.

The main objective in this study was to explore the relationship between phonological awareness and writing development in monolingual Spanish speaking children. The main hypothesis were 1) Phonological awareness development is closely related to children’s writing development and 2) the introduction of writing stimuli in phonological awareness tasks enhances the production of more analytical responses, even in pre-literate children. Subjects were 100 Mexican kindergartners. They were given a writing task and two different deletion tasks. In both, children had to delete the first phoneme of words. In one of the tasks children were given oral stimuli, whereas in the other children were given an oral stimuli together with the corresponding written word. The first letter was then covered.Results show that writing levels and phonological awareness correlate significantly. Also, the presence of writing significantly increases the number of correct responses.

In the present study, I compared implicit and explicit speech manipulation tasks for individuals who were exposed to an alphabetic system (Portuguese) to individuals exposed to a non-alphabetic system (Japanese). In Experiment I, performance on metaphonological tasks was measured for Japanese-Portuguese bilinguals with different levels of reading and writing skills. Results indicated that bilingual speakers who were not literate in Portuguese did not have phonemic awareness. In Experiment II, Japanese-Portuguese bilinguals, with varying levels of contact with the alphabet, were induced to produce speech errors. Although performance on a phoneme deletion task replicated the previous results, there were no differences between groups in the production of speech errors. The present study supports the proposal that only exposure to explicit alphabetic instruction contributes to the development of phonemic awareness. However, level of alphabetic exposure did not affect implicit knowledge of phonemes as revealed by induced speech errors.