Abstract
Written German is characterized by an underrepresentation of prosody. During writing acquisition, children have to tackle the question which prosodic features are realized by what means – if any. We examined traces of speech prosody in German children’s writing to dictation. A sample of 79 second graders were asked to write down eight sentences to dictation. We analyzed three potential reflections of speech prosody in children’s dictations: (a) Merging of preposition and definite article, potentially preferred after monosyllabic prepositions as in this case preposition and article may melt to the canonical trochaic foot in German. (b) The introduction of orthographically inadequate graphemic border markings within trisyllabic animal names, respecting borders of prosodic units like foot or syllable. (c) Omissions of the definite article in non-optimal prosodic positions, deviating from the preferred strong-weak rhythm. The occurrence of border markings was evaluated via graded perceptual judgments. We found no evidence for inter-word border markings being influenced by prosodic context, probably due to a ceiling effect. However, word-internal markings within animal names, although rarely occurring in general, were clearly influenced by prosodic structure: Most of them were produced at borders of feet or syllables, while significantly fewer markings were perceived at borders of syllable constituents or within consonant clusters. Moreover, we observed significantly more omissions of the definite article in non-optimal prosodic positions compared to potentially optimal positions. Thus, our results provide first evidence from writing acquisition for prosodic influences on writing in a language with scarce graphemic marking of prosody.
Highlights
During writing acquisition, children have to tackle the question which prosodic entities and features of oral speech are realized orthographically by what means – if any
Borders were perceived with increasing certainty in the predicted order: trochaic bisyllabic prepositions followed by definite article das > trochaic bisyllabic prepositions followed by definite article dem or den > monosyllabic preposition followed by definite article der or den
The present study aimed at finding reflections of speech prosody in children’s writing
Summary
Children have to tackle the question which prosodic entities and features of oral speech are realized orthographically by what means – if any. Typically developing children at an age of 7 or 8 years, as tested in the present study, are sensitive to prosodic structures in spoken language like word, phrase, syllable, subsyllabic constituent, foot, stress, or rhythm. We analyzed such reflections of speech prosody in German children’s writing acquisition for the first time To this end, we tested three hypotheses, addressing (1) the omission of between-word graphemic border markers, (2) the addition of word-internal border markers, and (3) the omission of determiners in non-optimal prosodic positions. We hypothesized that trisyllabic words (here: animal names) should be more often separated by the insertion of orthographically inadequate graphemic border markings, if at least one of the parts forms a prosodically optimal bisyllabic trochaic foot. Some of the animal names used are quite familiar to children aged seven or eight (e.g., Elefant, Pinguin, and Papagei [elephant, penguin, parrot]), others are rather infrequent and typically acquired late (see Table 2 for age of acquisition values), such that it seems likely that they were unfamiliar to most of the participants (e.g., Hermelin, Marabu, and Kormoran [ermine, marabou, cormorant])
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