Word Segmentation in Early Written Narratives

Abstract

This comparative study aims at understanding which the difficulties children face in word segmentation in early writings. The term 'word' is both a metalinguistic and an everyday term. Rules about word separation have evolved over many years and are now normative in the languages these children are trying to write: Italian, Portuguese, Spanish. Children hesitate precisely at those places where historically there was also hesitation. They probably face similar difficulties with the conceptual definition of the 'word'. A total of 987 texts written by second- and third-grade children (7 to 9 years) were collected in Argentina, Brazil, Italy, Mexico and Uruguay, in a large number of different schools. The children were asked to write the story of Little Red Riding Hood, well known by children in those cultures. The normative view led to a quantitative analysis of 'deviations' from present language orthographies to give an overall picture of the situation. The interpretative attitude aimed at understanding children's writing and is related to a qualitative analysis of the written strings where the most of the deviations are located. Illegal segmentations in Italian and Spanish concentrate in specific graphic positions, that are similarfor hypo- and hyper-segmentations in the two writing systems.