Written Language & Literacy - Volume 9, Issue 1, 2006

Scripts are often borrowed or adapted for writing new languages, and the borrowing language usually includes sounds not found in the source language. Mechanisms for accommodating new sounds or phonotactics have not been studied as a group before, and a wide variety of cases is considered here. The techniques are found to fall into a limited number of categories: inventory reduction, inventory expansion, character combination, character alteration, character borrowing, systematic additions to characters, diacritics, and character simplification. Examples are presented from a range of script typologies.

The Dutch spelling system, like other European spelling systems, represents a certain balance between preserving the spelling of morphemes (the morphological principle) and obeying letter-to-sound regularities (the phonological principle). We present experimental results with artificial learners that show a competition effect between the two principles: adhering more to one principle leads to more violations of the other. The artificial learners, memory-based learning algorithms, are trained (1) to convert written words to their phonemic counterparts and (2) to analyze written words on their morphological composition, based on data extracted from the CELEX lexical database. As an exception to the competition effect we show that introducing the schwa as a letter in the spelling system causes both morphology and phonology to be learnt better by the artificial learners. In general we argue that artificial learning studies are a tool in obtaining objective measurements on a spelling system that may be of help in spelling reform processes.

In earlier work (Sproat 2000), I characterized the layout of symbols in a script in terms of a calculus involving two dimensional catenation operators: I claimed that leftwards, rightwards, upwards, downwards and surrounding catenation are sufficient to describe the layout of any script. In the first half of this paper I analyze four Indic alphasyllabaries — Devanagari, Oriya, Kannada and Tamil — in terms of this model. A crucial claim is that despite the complexities of layout in alphasyllabic scripts, they are essentially no different in nature than alphabetic scripts, such as Latin. The second part of the paper explores implications of this view for theories of phonology and human processing of orthography. Apparently problematic is evidence that “phonemic awareness” — the ability for literate speakers to manipulate sounds consciously at the phoneme level — is much stronger with alphabetic scripts, than with alphasyllabaries. But phonemic awareness is not categorically absent for readers of Indic scripts; in general, how aware a reader is of a particular phoneme is related to how that phoneme is rendered in the script. Relevant factors appear to include whether the symbol is written inline, whether it is a diacritic, and whether it is ligatured with another symbol.

This study probes Hebrew-speaking children’s knowledge about vowel representation by diacritics and by vowel letters in emergent literacy stages, and how this knowledge changes with formal instruction in first grade. Sixteen kindergartners and sixteen first graders were administered two reading tasks, two meta-linguistic explanation tasks, and two writing tasks involving vowels in different phonological and orthographic constructions and morphological roles. The results show that kindergartners already have some knowledge about writing consonants, and proceed to meaningful reading and writing in first grade through learning about writing vowels. Reading and writing syllables were easier than word reading and writing in kindergarten, and converged in first grade. Explaining vowel differences in words was better than in syllables, since children made use of the lexical context. Learning to represent morphemes at word final position by vowel letters emerged gradually in kindergarten, in the following order: H, standing for a and e, then W and Y, representing o, u and i. The development of vowel letters is shown to be dependent on a variety of considerations — orthographic, morphological, phonological, and perceptual. These results are discussed in the context of general theories about the consolidation of spelling.

This paper provides evidence that the second language orthographic input affects the mental representations of L2 phonology in instructed beginner L2 learners. Previous research has shown that orthographic representations affect monolinguals’ performance in phonological awareness tasks; in instructed L2 learners such representations could also affect pronunciation. This study looked at the phonological representations of Chinese rimes in beginner learners of Chinese as a foreign language, using a phoneme counting task and a phoneme segmentation task. Results show that learners do not count or segment the main vowel in those syllables where it is not represented in the pinyin (romanisation) orthographic representations. It appears that the pinyin orthographic input is reinterpreted according to L1 phonology–orthography correspondences, and interacts with the phonological input in shaping the phonological representations of Chinese syllables in beginner learners. This explains previous findings that learners of Chinese do not pronounce the main vowel in these syllables.

Three lines of evidence suggest that phoneme awareness (as measured by phoneme deletion) is not a prerequisite for learning to read and spell. 1. A boy with a serious reading problem could provide letters to represent onsets and codas better than he could delete onsets and codas. 2. A contingent analysis of reading and spelling achievement and deletion of onsets or codas or deletion of one phoneme from a complex onset was undertaken in a sample of poor readers. Onset and coda deletion developed before the students’ decoding skills reached a third-grade level, but deletion of a phoneme from an onset developed along with reading achievement. 3. When phoneme deletion was tested by a recognition method, good eighth-grade readers erroneously accepted items with the entire onset deleted as being correct responses, and had longer response times on these items. Onset and coda deletion develop after onsets and codas are represented alphabetically and before children read at about a third-grade level. However deletion of one phoneme from an onset cluster develops slowly as literacy develops and is a difficult task even for good readers.

Current theories on dyslexia refer either to phonological or perceptual factors. The phonological theory explains dyslexia by a deficit in phonological awareness which would affect the build-up of grapheme–phoneme correspondences. This is challenged by the magnocellular theory which ascribes dyslexia to a deficit in temporal processing of auditory and visual signals. However, the auditory deficit in dyslexia is not specifically temporal. Further, the perceptual deficit is not merely sensory but cognitive in nature as evidenced by both weaker discrimination of phonological contrasts and stronger discrimination of differences within phonological categories. This reflects a deficit in “Categorical Perception” which is also sometimes associated with a weaker precision of the perceptual boundary between phonemes (“Boundary Precision” deficit). Categorical deficits are more reliable than magnocellular ones and might be no less reliable than those in phonemic awareness. The categorical deficit suggests that dyslexic children perceive speech with allophonic rather than phonemic units, which has straightforward consequences for the acquisition of phoneme–grapheme correspondences and might also explain the other phonological troubles associated with dyslexia.

This study reports on two experiments in which German participants had to type words presented to them in various modes. Experiment 1 compares typing following visual and oral word presentation with typing following picture presentation. In the second experiment typing responses following oral and visual word presentation were delayed by an extended preparatory period. Both experiments demonstrate significantly increased inter-keystroke intervals (IKIs) at exclusive syllable (S) boundaries and combined syllable and morpheme (SM) boundaries in comparison to within-syllable (L) boundaries. SM-IKIs are significantly larger than S-IKIs and influenced by word frequencies, indicating lexical dependencies. SM-IKIs were found to be significantly longer for oral than for visual word presentation. This is taken as an indication that additional processes are involved in the accessing of graphemic word forms when words are presented orally. Two effects of the typing delay were identified: a decrease of word initial latencies and the disappearance of size differences between SM-IKIs following visual and oral word presentation. On the other hand, the persistence of augmented SM- and S-IKIs in the delayed typing task indicates that input into the motor system is constituted by sub-word units instead by fully specified words. As SM- and S-IKIs reflect influences of different hierarchical levels of language processing, these findings suggest a processing architecture in which the peripheral motor system essentially connects at several hierarchical levels with central processing units.