Orthographic Analysis Research Articles

Music literacy shapes the specialization of a right hemispheric word reading area

This study aimed to examine differences in the brain activity of professional musicians and non-musicians, particularly in relation to neuroplastic changes that may be associated with musical training. Specifically, we investigated whether the ability to read complex musical notation might be linked to neurofunctional adaptations that could influence word reading mechanisms. The study involved 80 participants (half of which were musicians). High-density EEG recordings and swLORETA inverse solutions were employed to analyze brain activity related to word processing and orthographic analysis. The electromagnetic signals were analyzed in the temporal window corresponding to the latency of N170 component (150–190 ms). Musicians and musically naïve people (controls) were matched based on native language, sociocultural and educational status, age, and laterality preference. Behavioural data and reading proficiency tests demonstrated higher reading skills (for words, non-words and text), and faster RTs to target letters embedded in words, in musicians. Source reconstruction showed fundamental differences in word reading mechanisms between musicians and non-musicians, including a larger involvement of the right occipitotemporal cortex, in the former than the latter. In particular, musicians showed a bilateral activation of the middle occipital gyrus (BA19, Visual Word Form Area), which was strongly lateralized to the left hemisphere in controls, during word orthographic analysis. A relationship is proposed between music literacy, enhanced reading skills and the development of a right-sided reading area for notation recognition in musicians, which could serve as a potential protective factor for ‘surface’ dyslexia.

Orthographic Analysis of Social Media Discourse: The Case of WhatsApp Messages of Undergraduate Students at the National University of Lesotho

This paper examined the orthography of words used by the National University of Lesotho undergraduate students on WhatsApp. Although language is regarded as a coherent and homogeneous system, it can also be studied in its variations across time and space and how it is actually used in social interaction. Youth immersion in the use of social media has successfully made the presence of the digital era to be felt not only in social life but also in communicative competencies. This paper recognised the youth linguistic creativity as a concept that characterised nomenclature of spelling conventions observed on social media. Using voluntary participatory approach, data was collected from undergraduate students majoring in English at the University who volunteered to share their WhatsApp posts for the purpose of this study. Data revealed that youths’ social media discourse featured different orthographic representations as a result of accent stylisation, substitution, acronym, hybrid, clipping, coalescence, onomatopoeic spellings and deletions. The paper concluded that youth social media discourse deviates from conventional spellings, and thus serves as a linguistic innovation from the part of the youths. It further concluded that social media discourse is a true reflection of language diversity in this digital era especially with regards to the language of the youth globally.

An Orthographic Analysis of Sound Changing Rules in the Urdu Language

The current study aims to determine the sound-changing rules in the Urdu language and their underlying causes. For this purpose, words that exhibited distinct pronunciations as compared to their written forms were selected for the study. A list of 500 words was prepared from the Urdu dictionary "Feeroz-ul-Lughat," and twenty (20) proficient Urdu language speakers were selected to articulate these chosen words. The study’s analysis was divided into three stages, namely recording, transcribing, and examining the speakers' pronunciations to identify the sound changing patterns; consulting the dictionary for standard transcriptions; and phonetically and orthographically transcribing and examining the selected words. The findings revealed various contextual occurrences in which phonological changes had occurred. Additionally, after a thorough examination, the evidence supporting or contradicting the existing sound-changing rules was explored through the selected words from the Urdu language. Markedly, this study aims to enhance the understanding of the phonological dynamics in spoken Urdu expressions as well as the major factors contributing to sound changes in the Urdu language.

Effects of text messaging using digital Pinyin input on literacy skills of elementary school Chinese immersion learners

Children learning Chinese must cope with an opaque orthography lacking transparent relations between oral pronunciations and written characters: a challenge heightened for L2 learners. Use of digital Pinyin input may facilitate connections between oral and written language by allowing learners to access vocabulary they cannot yet write. We assessed the effects of promoting digital Pinyin writing by engaging students in text messaging in digital chat rooms as part of the 4th grade Chinese language arts curriculum at an American Chinese immersion school. Students in two classes engaged in text messaging over eight weeks while a matched group of students in other classes taught by the same teachers ( N = 28 per condition) completed their regular pencil-and-paper word work, which emphasized morphological and orthographic analysis of meaning- and sound-based radicals and sets of related characters. Post-intervention, children who engaged in text messaging showed lesser gains in Chinese writing as compared to the children who completed word work, though within texting groups children who did well at texting showed greater gains in writing as compared to children with lesser success at texting. Given the urgent need for effective online learning, the findings indicate that care should be taken when introducing digital Pinyin input into the Chinese language arts curriculum as it should supplement, but not replace, multi-component word work exercises that promote awareness of orthographic patterns, meaning, and Pinyin.

From Moravia to Pskov: Text and Extratexts of the St. Sophia Triodion

The article is devoted to the analysis of a previously unpublished caption to the drawing in the Triodion manuscript Nr. 84 of the collection of the Cathedral of St Sophia in the Russian National Library, St Petersburg, and to the study of paleographic, orthographic and linguistic features of this codex. Based on paleographic data, the Sophia Triodion should date back to the second half of the 14th century. The identification of one of the handwritings of the manuscript with the main handwriting of the Service Menaia Nr. 101, 106, and 111 from the collection of the Synodal Typography in the Russian State Archives of Early Acts, Moscow, allows placing the codex Soph. 84 in the circle of manuscripts associated with the famous Pskov scriptorium of Andrei, priest of the St. Nicholas Church. The orthographic analysis of the handwritings presented in Soph. 84 shows that the scribes of most of the manuscript (before fol. 199 and after fol. 230) are opposed as rather conservative for the 14th century to the scribes who copied the ff. 199–230. Perhaps the scribes of this “conservative&8j1; part sought to accurately convey the orthographic features of the ancient antigraph of Triodion, which, as some researchers believe, dates back to the Moravian period of the development of Slavic writing; the latter thesis is confirmed by some Western Slavic linguistic features preserved by the text of the Soph. 84. At the same time, all four scribes have interspersed phonetic dialectisms: tsokanye (ts–ch merger), zhg < *zdj/*zg(i) and a single example of the merger of whistling and hushing consonants – the most important argument in favor of the Pskov origin of the manuscript.

Srednjovjekovni rukopisni primjerak Avicenina medicinskog djela Cantica canticorum cum commento Averrois iz Metropolitanske knjižnice u Zagrebu

The paper presents a research of a manuscript copy of the medical work Cantica canticorum cum commento Averrois, which is kept in the Metropolitan Library in Zagreb, and the translation was made in the 14th century. This codex has been subjected to paleographic and orthographic analysis and historical medical conceptualization of content. In addition to presenting hitherto unknown data on this codex, the paper provides an overview of other medieval medical codices that are part of the Metropolitan Library’s collection as well as others kept in other libraries in Croatia, and presents the results of their previous research. The paper highlights medieval medical codices, and especially the analyzed Avicenna Codex, as important artifacts for tracing the ways of spreading knowledge and perceptions of ancient medical and philosophical thought within Arab and medieval medical doctrines.

O rukopisu Kitab-i bosnevi iz Zbirke bosanske alhamijado književnosti sa pojedinim arapskim tekstovima

The poem Kitab-i bosnevi is just one of several that represents a compilation of moralistic alhamijado poems. They are collected in one Collection of Bosnian alhamijado literature with individual Arabic texts. The aim is to determine orthographic features through orthographic and phonetic-phonological analysis of the manuscript Kitab-i bosnevi, supposed to date from the 19th century, show how the author wrote words of domestic origin and recorded terms of oriental origin taken from Arabic and Persian. Detailed orthographic analysis of words of domestic and oriental origin was emphasised in the poem Kitab-i bosnevi. The Viennese version of Sehvetul-vusul, by Omer Hazim Humo, offered us more precise insight into the characteristics of writing alhamijado literature. Words of oriental origin were recorded by respecting their way of writing concerning the original language. In some examples, there were deviations where the author offered a completely different way of recording certain voices. Based on the phonetic-phonological analysis of the song Kitab-i bosnevi, specific voices are entirely adapted to the phonetic system of the Bosnian language.

О НЕКИМ ОРТОГРАФСКИМ ОДЛИКАМА ПИСАНЕ ГРАЂЕ ИЗ 19. ВИЈЕКА (ИЛУСТРАЦИЈЕ И КОМЕНТАРИ) / ON SOME ORTHOGRAPHIC CHARACTERISTICS OF THE WRITTEN MATERIAL FROM THE 19TH CENTURY (ILLUSTRATIONS AND COMMENTS)

One hundred and seventy years after the death of Petar II Petrovic Njegos, and one hundred and ninety years since he was elected as the head of the Montenegrin state, and, therefore, since the establishment of the Montenegrin Senate, are all the reasons and an important occasion for returning to the written material of the Montenegrin Senate in this paper. The paper is part of a broader linguistic analysis of the documentation of the central and highest state authority in 19th -century Montenegro. It represents an orthographic analysis of the original documents of the Montenegrin Senate (formed at the beginning of the rule of Njegos – 1831) – both as the addresser and the addressee. Specifically, we followed the written reflection of consonant contacts at the morpheme boundaries within words, as well as consonant contacts at the junctions of individual words. Given the number of correspondents of the epistolary communication of the Montenegrin Senate, our analysis reveals the segments of collective orthographic practice from that period in Montenegro. The conclusions about the collective orthographic practice of one period are based on the process of monitoring the spelling procedures of individuals of different literacy levels. In spite of their limitations and, therefore, the limitations of the analysis, it provided the material that helped us discern a collective orthographic trait – a considerable inconsistency in the orthography of consonant groups at the morpheme boundaries within words and relative stability in their orthography at the junction of individual words: in the orthography of consonant groups at the morpheme boundaries within words, two ways of writing are dominant – morphological and phonological, while in the orthography of consonant groups at the junctions of separate words, the morphological principle is mostly established. The same type of orthographic instability was mainly characteristic of the literary expression of the 19th century. This is observable in the comparison of the recorded situation with the data about the orthography of Njegos and with the data on the orthographic procedures of other writers of the time in Montenegro.

Tonal and orthographic analysis in a Cantonese-speaking individual with nonfluent/agrammatic variant primary progressive aphasia

ABSTRACT Clinical understanding of primary progressive aphasia (PPA) has been established based on English-speaking population. The lack of linguistic diversity in research hinders the diagnosis of PPA in non-English speaking patients. This case report describes the tonal and orthographic deficits of a multilingual native Cantonese-speaking woman with nonfluent/agrammatic variant PPA (nfvPPA) and progressive supranuclear palsy. Our findings suggest that Cantonese-speaking nfvPPA patients exhibit tone production impairments, tone perception deficits at the lexical selection processing, and linguistic dysgraphia errors unique to logographic script writer. These findings suggest that linguistic tailored approaches offer novel and effective tools in identifying non-English speaking PPA individuals.

FILLERS IN ACADEMIC DISCOURSE: AN ANALYSIS OF LECTURES FROM A PUBLIC UNIVERSITY IN GHANA

One way of ensuring fluency in lesson delivery for students to follow its flow in the classroom is through the use of fillers. This study examines the use of fillers in lectures in a public university in Ghana. Specifically, it investigates the types of fillers used in the Ghanaian English-medium classroom and discusses the communicative functions the fillers perform. To achieve these, real-time lessons were recorded from 24 lecturers in the university. The data were subjected to orthographic transcription, categorization, and thematic analysis of fillers for their types and functions in the lessons. Results show that the lecturers used 51 unlexicalized and lexicalized fillers. The unlexicalized ones comprised um, er, and uh while the lexicalized types consisted of lengthened syllables, repetition, and single words. With respect to the communicative functions, the fillers were found to perform cognitive functions (stalling and hesitating), social functions (attention getting and feedback), and discourse-regulatory functions (as editing term and discourse closing). Based on these results, it is proposed that lecturers should understand the importance of fillers so as to use them to their benefit and that of their students.
 
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Methods Of Orthographic And Grammatic Analysis Of Uzbek Writing

Orthography is a system of rules adopted to correctly express an idea through writing, which ensures that the idea is equally expressed both for the writer and for the reader. In the teaching of orthography, hearing and sight play an important role. In addition, factors such as logical thinking, memory, intelligence also play an important role in the formation of orthographic skills in students. These are those in which orthography creates a certain system in teaching, one complements the other. This article will give an idea of the methods of orthographic analysis.

Children\u2019s neurodevelopment of reading is affected by China\u2019s language input system in the information era

Communications through electronic devices require knowledge in typewriting, typically with the pinyin input method in China. Yet, the over utilization of the pronunciation-based pinyin input method may violate the traditional learning processes of written Chinese, which involves abundant visual orthographic analysis of characters and repeated writing. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine the influence of pinyin typing on reading neurodevelopment of intermediate Chinese readers (age 9–11). We found that, relative to less frequent pinyin users, more frequent pinyin users showed an overall weaker pattern of cortical activations in the left middle frontal gyrus, left inferior frontal gyrus, and right fusiform gyrus in performing reading tasks. In addition, more frequent pinyin typists had relatively less gray matter volume in the left middle frontal region, a site known to be crucial for Chinese reading. This study demonstrates that Chinese children’s brain development in the information era is affected by the frequent use of the pinyin input method.

Znaménko rozlišovací a zdůrazňovací ve staročeských rukopisech

The article discusses the application of the principles of diacritical orthography in writing Czech words in the Latin treatise Orthographia Bohemica which contains instructions on how digraphs in Czech written texts should be replaced by diacritical signs. While many scholars consider Master Jan Hus to be the author, the treatise was copied by Kříž z Telče (Crux of Telč), a teacher and a priest, by hand into his manuscript convolute at the end of the 1450s. However, Kříž failed to write down the exemplary Czech words exactly according to the instructions in the treatise. At first sight, the signs above the letters seem chaotic and inaccurate. In medieval writings, signs carried out two main functions: first, a sign only accentuated a particular character (sign of non-semantic accentuation) and distinguished it from other, formally similar graphemes (e.g. <ẏ> versus <v>). Secondly, a sign provided a character with a different meaning (a diacritical sign) and a glyph with a sign represented a phoneme different than a glyph without a sign (e.g. <z> versus <ž>). An orthographic analysis of some Czech biblical manuscripts from both the first and the second half of the 15th century has revealed that scribes used these two systems of accentuation at the same time and combined them. That is why the c /t͡ s/ and č /t͡ ʃ/ consonants recorded in the Orthogpraphia Bohemica treatise as either <c> or <ċ> or <č> graphemes cannot be considered a simple scribe’s mistake but rather, a reflection of a different scribal usage.

Word inversion sensitivity as a marker of visual word form area lateralization: An application of a novel multivariate measure of laterality

An area within the ventral occipitotemporal cortex (vOTC), the "visual word form area" (VWFA), typically exhibits a strongly left-lateralized response to orthographic stimuli in skilled readers. While individual variation in VWFA lateralization has been observed, the behavioral significance of laterality differences remains unclear. Here, we test the hypothesis that differences in VWFA lateralization reflect differing preferences for holistic orthographic analysis. To examine this hypothesis, we implemented a new multivariate method that uses machine learning to assess functional lateralization, along with a traditional univariate lateralization method. We related these neural metrics to behavioral indices of holistic orthographic analysis (inversion sensitivity). The multivariate measure successfully detected the lateralization of orthographic processing in the VWFA, and as hypothesized, predicted behavioral differences in holistic orthographic analysis. An exploratory whole brain analysis identified further regions with a relationship between inversion sensitivity and lateralization: one near the junction of the inferior frontal and precentral sulci, and another along the superior temporal gyrus. We conclude that proficient native readers of English exhibit differences in cortical lateralization of the VWFA that have significant implications for reading behavior.

Anglicisms as Neologisms in the Albanian Press from the 1990s

The influence of the English language on the Albanian language, a phenomenon of the last two decades, seems to be drawing the linguists’ attention. A corpus of 511 Anglicisms bears witness to the active life of these English borrowings in the Albanian press after the 1990s. This paper outlines some aspects of Anglicisms’ life and ‘behaviour’ in Albanian press language. It deals with some aspects of their morpho-syntactic, phonetic, orthographic and semantic analysis. It also draws a distinction between Anglicisms that have been subjected to the grammatical rules of the Albanian language and those that have entered Albanian keeping their English language properties intact. Anglicisms as neologisms shall be the focus of this modest contribution in this vase area of study and research. A generally positive attitude is held towards the use of Anglicisms in the Albanian press language in order to fill the lexical gaps with words and phrases denoting new concepts and notions or carrying extra connotative meanings rather than their use to duplicate existing lexical units in Albanian, in an effort to preserve the Albanian language identity in this globalization epoch of ours, thus contributing to the linguistic and cultural heritage of the country. DOI: 10.5901/jesr.2016.v6n1p141

Orthographic competence among multilingual school children: writing Moroccan Arabic in France

This paper presents children's writing in their vernacular family language, Moroccan Arabic. It first provides some background to the family and school literacies of nine-year-old children of Moroccan Arabic (MA) background growing up in France with French literacy practices at school and Written Arabic literacy practices in the home. The paper then presents the results of an orthographic analysis of the children's attempts to write their vernacular family language, MA, an Arabic dialect not generally used for written purposes. When writing MA for the first time, the children have to rely on the implicit and explicit knowledge of the writing systems they have already acquired, namely, French, the language of schooling, and Standard Arabic which is regularly present in the home, although the children's competence in it is limited. The children's writing in Moroccan Arabic is highly structured and shows how the children harness French orthographic rules to conceive the new writing system.

Real-time functional architecture of visual word recognition.

Despite a century of research into visual word recognition, basic questions remain unresolved about the functional architecture of the process that maps visual inputs from orthographic analysis onto lexical form and meaning and about the units of analysis in terms of which these processes are conducted. Here we use magnetoencephalography, supported by a masked priming behavioral study, to address these questions using contrasting sets of simple (walk), complex (swimmer), and pseudo-complex (corner) forms. Early analyses of orthographic structure, detectable in bilateral posterior temporal regions within a 150-230 msec time frame, are shown to segment the visual input into linguistic substrings (words and morphemes) that trigger lexical access in left middle temporal locations from 300 msec. These are primarily feedforward processes and are not initially constrained by lexical-level variables. Lexical constraints become significant from 390 msec, in both simple and complex words, with increased processing of pseudowords and pseudo-complex forms. These results, consistent with morpho-orthographic models based on masked priming data, map out the real-time functional architecture of visual word recognition, establishing basic feedforward processing relationships between orthographic form, morphological structure, and lexical meaning.

The dynamic influence of emotional words on sentence processing

In the present study, we aimed to examine how the emotionality of words influences online sentence processing-specifically, the influence of emotional words on the processing of following words in sentences. We manipulated the emotionality of verbs as well as the orthographic correctness of their following (neutral) object nouns, so that the orthographic violation of the (neutral) nouns occurred in either emotional or neutral sentences. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded to both the nouns and the verbs. We found that the orthographic violation of the nouns elicited a P2 and an N400 effect in the emotionally neutral sentences, but an LPC effect in the emotionally charged sentences. We also found that the emotional verbs elicited a larger N1, a larger P2, and a larger N400 than did the neutral verbs. The ERP results suggest that emotional words capture more attention than neutral words, which further affects early orthographic analysis of the following words. Our findings demonstrate a dynamic influence of emotional words on sentence processing.

Can cognitive models explain brain activation during word and pseudoword reading? A meta-analysis of 36 neuroimaging studies.

Reading in many alphabetic writing systems depends on both item-specific knowledge used to read irregular words (sew, yacht) and generative spelling-sound knowledge used to read pseudowords (tew, yash). Research into the neural basis of these abilities has been directed largely by cognitive accounts proposed by the dual-route cascaded and triangle models of reading. We develop a framework that enables predictions for neural activity to be derived from cognitive models of reading using 2 principles: (a) the extent to which a model component or brain region is engaged by a stimulus and (b) how much effort is exerted in processing that stimulus. To evaluate the derived predictions, we conducted a meta-analysis of 36 neuroimaging studies of reading using the quantitative activation likelihood estimation technique. Reliable clusters of activity are localized during word versus pseudoword and irregular versus regular word reading and demonstrate a great deal of convergence between the functional organization of the reading system put forward by cognitive models and the neural systems activated during reading tasks. Specifically, left-hemisphere activation clusters are revealed reflecting orthographic analysis (occipitotemporal cortex), lexical and/or semantic processing (anterior fusiform, middle temporal gyrus), spelling-sound conversion (inferior parietal cortex), and phonological output resolution (inferior frontal gyrus). Our framework and results establish that cognitive models of reading are relevant for interpreting neuroimaging studies and that neuroscientific studies can provide data relevant for advancing cognitive models. This article thus provides a firm empirical foundation from which to improve integration between cognitive and neural accounts of the reading process.

Le statut des séquences “N+N à N2 productif”

This article investigates the status of French N+N constructions in which the N2 productively combines with different N1’s (e.g. réunion marathon ‘marathon meeting’, examen marathon ‘marathon exam’, plaidoyer marathon ‘marathon plea’, etc). In the literature, this construction has been analyzed in very different ways, going from regular N+N compounding to the syntactic combination of a noun with a second noun converted into an adjective. In a first section, the arguments in favour of these different analyses are discussed. The second section is devoted to a specific case study in which the construction N-clé ‘key N’ (mot-clé ‘key word’, fonction-clé ‘key function’, élément-clé ‘key element’, etc.) is subjected to a profound semantic, orthographic, morphological and syntactic analysis. It will be observed that in recent uses the N-clé construction has developed some new syntactic properties that might be accounted for by a process of degrammaticalization.