Orthographic Rules Research Articles

Derivational Morphology Bridges Phonology and Orthography: Insights Into the Development of Word-Specific Spellings by Superior, Average, and Poor Spellers

Purpose Morphology, which is a bridge between phonology and orthography, plays an important role in the development of word-specific spellings. This study, which employed longitudinal sampling of typically developing students in Grades 3, 4, and 5, explored how the misspellings of words with derivational suffixes shed light on the interplay of phonological, orthographic, and morphological (POM) linguistic features as students learn to integrate POM features appropriately to generate correct spellings. Method Sixty typically developing Grade 3 students were tested using the Spelling subtest from the Wechsler Individual Achievement Test-Second Edition (Wechsler, 2001) and were divided into superior, average, and poor spellers. Students' spelling skill was then assessed using the Wechsler Individual Achievement Test-Second Edition annually for another 2 years. Misspelled derivations from these three testing sessions were analyzed for linguistic feature errors and error complexity/severity. Differences in the integration of POM features across spelling ability levels at Grades 3-5 were analyzed with Kruskal-Wallis analyses of variance. Results Longitudinal results demonstrated POM integration for the development of word-specific spellings involving derivational morphology was in its initial stages over Grades 3-5 and was influenced by spelling ability level. Information from a qualitative analysis revealed considerable variability in how students applied their POM knowledge to spell complex derivations. Conclusions Word-specific spellings draw on multiple linguistic codes-P, O, and M-and their interconnections. It involves more than an understanding of orthographic rules. Rather, accurate spelling develops through an increased understanding of the phoneme-grapheme relationships as facilitated by the identification of word parts (base + or - affixes) in written language. Educational and clinical implications are discussed.

Incidental changes in orthographic processing in the native language as a function of learning a new language late in life

ABSTRACT Acquiring a second alphabetic language also entails learning a new set of orthographic rules and specific patterns of grapheme combinations (namely, the orthotactics). The present longitudinal study aims to investigate whether orthotactic sensitivity changes over the course of a second language learning programme. To this end, a group of Spanish monolingual old adults completed a Basque language learning course. They were tested in different moments with a language decision task that included pseudowords that could be Basque-marked, Spanish-marked or neutral. Results showed that the markedness effect varied as a function of second language acquisition, showing that learning a second language changes the sensitivity not only to the orthographic patterns of the newly acquired language, but to those of the native language too. These results demonstrate that the orthographic representations of the native language are not static and that experience with a second language boosts markedness perception in the first language.

The Influence of the German Capitalization Rules on Reading

German orthography systematically marks all nouns (even other nominalized word classes) by capitalizing their first letter.It is often claimed that readers benefit from the uppercase-letter syntactic and semantic information,which makes the processing of sentences easier (e.g Bock et al. 1985, 1989). In order to test this hypothesis, we asked 54 German readers to read single sentences systematically manipulated by a target word (N).In the experimental condition (EXP), we used semantic priming (in the following example: sick → cold) in order to build up a strong expectation of a noun, which was actually an attribute for the following noun (N+1) (translated to English e.g. sick writer had a cold (N) nose (N+1) …).The sentences in the control condition were built analogously, but word N was purposefully altered (keeping word length and frequency constant) to make its interpretation as a noun extremely unlikely (e.g. sick writer had a blue (N) nose (N+1) …). In both conditions, the sentences were presented either following German standard orthography (Cap) or in lowercase spelling (NoCap). The capitalized nouns in the EXP/Cap condition should then prevent garden-path parsing, as capital letters can be recognized parafoveally. However, in the EXP/NoCap condition, we expected a garden-path effect on word N+1 affecting first-pass fixations and the number of regressions, as the reader realizes that word N is instead an adjective. As the control condition does not include a garden path, we expected to find (small) effects of the violation of the orthographic rule in the CON/NoCap condition, but no garden-path effect.As a global result, it can be stated that reading sentences in which nouns are not marked by a majuscule slows a native German reader down significantly, but from an absolute point of view, the effect is small. Compared with other manipulations (e.g. transpositions or substitutions), a lowercase letter still represents the correct allograph in the correct position without affecting phonology. Furthermore, most German readers do have experience with other alphabetic writing systems that lack consistent noun capitalization, and in (private) digital communication lowercase nouns are quite common.Although our garden-path sentences did: last words missing, see PDF!

The Orthographic Rules of the Eighteenth Century Armeno-Persian Gospels of the Matenadaran (Ms. 8492, Ms. 3044)

The Persian Gospel codices of the Matenadaran collection, written in Armenian script in the eighteenth century in Shamakhi and Ganja, are important sources for the study of the interethnic, interfaith, and intercultural circumstances of historical Shirvan (located in Transcaucasia) of that period. These manuscripts are also considered to be essential sources for the study of inter-linguistic issues of Armenian and Persian, the Armenian orthographic rules of that period, and one of the local versions of Persian, spoken in Shirvan. In the eighteenth century, Persian was the interethnic contact language of this area and the manuscripts examined here were written for the Christian Armenians of the region. This article presents how the Armenian alphabet reflects the phonetic system of eighteenth century Persian spoken in Shirvan using the orthographic rules of Armenian.

Wielka litera w tekstach urzędowych. Wybrane problemy związane ze stosowaniem kryterium znaczeniowego.

This paper discusses the orthographic standard of the modern Polish language as regards capitalisation. On selected examples, we point to the fact that the general nature of orthographic rules governing capitalisation makes them ignore numerous phenomena characteristic of the economic and legal sphere. The absence of an up-to-date and diverse sample material illustrating the individual rules, in turn, hampers making prescriptive decisions with regard to the spelling of specifi c expressions from the domain of the latest offi cial Polish language. As a consequence, the mismatch between codifi cation and usage increases, which is exemplifi ed in the analytical part of the paper. The conducted research leads to the conclusion that such standardisation of the spelling of specialist varieties of Polish as satisfi es the needs of its users is an urgent matter.

Spell it the way you like: The inconsistencies that prevail in the spelling of Northern Sotho loanwords

A scrutiny of Northern Sotho Terminology and Orthography No. 4 of 1988 (T&O) and a survey of some Northern Sotho dictionaries make one wonder if rules are always followed in the lemmatisation of Northern Sotho loanwords. Northern Sotho, like any other language, has rules governing its spelling and orthography, thanks to T&O. The T&O and other editions of Northern Sotho terminology and orthography tried to dictate and explain the spelling and orthography rules to be followed in the writing of Northern Sotho words (native and adopted words). The spelling rules laid down are sometimes contradictory. This article shows the inconsistencies that prevail in the spelling of some Northern Sotho loanwords, arguing that some of these words are not fully adapted to the Northern Sotho spelling orthography. Writing a ‘sotho-ised’ version of a foreign word is not that simple; rules are sometimes broken (or rather bent) to suit the writer. Most of the data comes from the Northern Sotho Terminology and Orthography No. 4 of 1988 and Northern Sotho dictionaries.

Writing and orthographic rules -the basis of language development

Writing and orthographic rules -the basis of language development

Karakteristike čitanja i pravopisa kod dece sa disgrafičnim rukopisom

The aim of this study was to analyze the characteristics of reading and the orthographic level of handwriting in children with dysgraphic handwriting and children with typical development in the early grades of primary school. The research sample consisted of 94 children in the 3rd and 4th grades of primary school. The Handwriting Dysgraphia Assessment Test was used to assess the level of handwriting dysgraphia, while the analysis of the orhographic level of handwriting involved the assessment of the frequency and type of orthographic errors. The Three-Dimensional Reading Test was used in the second stage of research. Findings show the overall prevalence of handwriting dysgraphia in 13.8% of children, and a greater prevalence in boys (69.1%) relative to girls (30.9%). In the group of children with dysgraphic handwriting, 53.8% were categorized as having "graphomotor dysgraphia", while 46.2% were categorized as having "language dysgraphia". The study results suggest that there are no statistically significant differences between 3rd and 4th grade students in the application of orthographic rules to all writing tasks (t=1,33; df=11; p=0,17). Children with dysgraphic handwriting achieved poorer results on all writing tasks relative to children with typical development. A comparison of results of children with dysgraphic handwriting and children with typical development did not reveal statistically significant differences in reading speed tasks (t=1,10; df=18; p=0,32), number of mistakes (t=0,73; df=21; p=0,46), and reading comprehension (t=0,66; df=14; p=0,51). Increasing awareness of aspects of writing and reading where difficulties may occur, but also of aspects that represent children's developmental strengths, along with an effective assessment of language and cognitive abilities, would significantly improve the quality of the teaching process.

Rovásírással – latinul

The Hungarian Runic script (or, according to another terminology, Szekler script), rarely used in the 10th–14th centuries, had got some popularity in the era of the Renaissance. There are a few examples, where the letters, originally devised for the Hungarian language, were combined with or used for Latin words. Thus the author of the Sepsikilyén wall graffito wrote X ʃcribʃit ◦ ← BNDK2 I[[L]]` Ly´ ES, that is Benedek Illyés scripsit; probably there is another hic fuit-graffito in Berekeresztúr from 1581, written partly in Runic script. The most prominent example is István Szamosközy’s Latin epigram from 1604, a pasquin against Emperor and King Rudolph, where Runic script was used as kind of a cryptography, the author had to set several orthographic rules for the Latin language in Runes and partially accommodated the graphotactics to the Latin custom too.

‘Hakken en plakken’

Abstract Orthography is considered to be a major problem in Dutch education, since many pupils don’t seem to be able to master orthographic rules, even after years of education. In educational literature it is argued that the problems related to spelling are caused by approaches that focus more on rules of thumb than on linguistic insights. This is somewhat remarkable, since a good understanding of the Dutch orthographic system requires a fair amount of morphological knowledge. In order to effectively implement this knowledge, the development of a morphological awareness (MA) seems to be required. Therefore, a short intervention was designed for the upper levels of secondary schools (4 havo) which aimed to foster MA and, subsequently, improve orthographic skills. Results of this quasi-experimental study indicate that a short intervention can significantly boost MA, but that students don’t seem to be able to use MA effectively to enhance spelling performance.

Funciones y criterios lingüísticos para el uso de la coma en la Ortografía académica (2010)

The RAE and the ASALE published their Ortografía de la lengua española in 2010, where, among other orthographic rules, the use of punctuation marks is established. The orthographic competence for the use of these signs, particularly in the case of the comma, requires a complex linguistic (prosody, morphosyntax, semantics, discourse analysis, etc.) and extralinguistic know-ledge on the part of its users. In view of such complexity, this article seeks to conduct a critical review of the main functions of the comma and the criteria followed in the aforementioned work to establish the rules for comma usage.

Harmony Rules and the Suffix Domain: A Study of Maya Scribal Conventions

In 2004, Lacadena and Wichmann proposed a set of orthographic rules for the Maya script. The choice of using one of three different patterns of syn- or disharmonic spellings allowed Maya scribes to signal whether word-final syllables contained a short vowel, a long vowel or a glottal stop. In our earlier paper we focused on the lexical evidence for these orthographic «harmony rules». Although it was stated that the rules apply equally well when a suffix is involved and when no suffix is involved, the data relating to the former situation were not discussed in detail. This is the aim of the present paper.

Open Questions on Writing and the Use of Croatian Exonyms on MapS

Croatian exonyms are Croatian adapted names of foreign geographical features that differ from their original names (endonyms). The writing, use, and treatment of exonyms are not always unambiguous, unique, systematic, and consistent. Thus, authors and editors of maps and atlases frequently face the question of should they choose an exonym (and which one), an endonym, or both. They resolve them by entering various exonym forms, using both forms of names (exonyms and endonyms), or omitting exonyms even when they exist. This situation is a direct outcome of having multiple names and of the different use of exonyms. Double naming can be the result of the complex status of toponyms in multilingual areas and of a vague boundary between current and historical exonyms. Until recently, the problems of writing and the use of exonyms were usually simply stated and confirmed by scarce examples. The purpose of this article is to stress out the need to apply a systematic approach to exonym research methodology. The aim is to highlight the open questions on writing and the use of Croatian exonyms by analysing general and school world atlases published in the last forty years, and to confirm them with representative examples. As the analysis indicates, writing and the use of many exonyms in our world atlases is quite chaotic. This is a consequence of having unstandardized exonyms and overly general orthographic rules and toponymic guidelines for exonyms. All mentioned should be in the focus of a national interdisciplinary authority that would carry out the standardization of all Croatian geographical names as well as exonyms.

A QUESTÃO DA ORTOGRAFIA NO PROCESSO DE ALFABETIZAÇÃO: ASPECTOS SOCIOFONÉTICOS

The purpose of this work is to make a descriptive analysis of the deviations committed by children in the initial stage of literacy, who already have a certain degree of knowledge of the alphabet and of orthographic rules, with emphasis on orality-based deviations. To do so, a theoretical framework on literacy and phonetics, such as: CAGLIARI (2005), SILVA (2001), SOARES (2005) e ZORZI (1998). To perform the research, we chose to construct a corpus with data from two schools located in Apiai (SP) and Mariana (MG). The students, in this study, are in the same school series with ages between 8 and 9 years old, come from families of the lower middle class. The chosen research route goes through the descriptive analysis of the causes of these deviations. The specific objectives of this work are to classify the types of orthographic deviations collected in the texts, to analyze the motivations existing in the orthographic deviations and to identify the type of intervention existing in the spelling deviations. After a descriptive analysis of the data, it is possible to verify that phonetics is very present in children's texts and that despite being from different states, children commit similar types of deviations, as well as different deviations.

A good use of Spanish in medical manuscripts

Wording problems are common in medical literature. The essence of any scientific work is to be understandable. A correct writing technique allows to communicate with the reader in an easy and accessible way, without disregarding proper grammatical and orthographic rules. This work is an updated guideline for the proper writing of biomedical manuscripts in Spanish. It avoids cumbersome grammatical explanations, aiming to become a simple material available for quick consultation.

Turkish lexicon expansion by using finite state automata

Turkish is an agglutinative language with rich morphology. A Turkish verb can have thousands of different word forms. Therefore, sparsity becomes an issue in many Turkish natural language processing (NLP) applications. This article presents a model for Turkish lexicon expansion. We aimed to expand the lexicon by using a morphological segmentation system by reversing the segmentation task into a generation task. Our model uses finite-state automata (FSA) to incorporate orthographic features and morphotactic rules. We extracted orthographic features by capturing phonological operations that are applied to words whenever a suffix is added. Each FSA state corresponds to either a stem or a suffix category. Stems are clustered based on their parts-of-speech (i.e. noun, verb, or adjective) and suffixes are clustered based on their allomorphic features. We generated approximately 1 million word forms by using only a few thousand Turkish stems with an accuracy of 82.36%, which will help to reduce the out-of-vocabulary size in other NLP applications. Although our experiments are performed on Turkish language, the same model is also applicable to other agglutinative languages such as Hungarian and Finnish.

Советская орфография: предыстория, программы, реализация

The article is devoted to the orthographic reform of 1917-1918 and the cultural and historical context in which it was prepared. The era between the reign of Alexander II and the revolution is characterized by a broad public debate about a wide range of reforms. During these decades, a mass of various reform projects appeared. It is in this context that projects of simplification of Russian orthography should also be considered. The issue of simplification of orthography was first raised by the teachers, complaining that teaching children orthographic rules took almost the entire academic time. In the course of this discussion, positions of both reform advocates and their opponents were formed. Then public and academic institutions developing the reform project began to arise. The projects of “simplified” orthography, which resulted from the reform”, in practice meant its approach to a variety of "national" orthography systems. In the first years after the revolution, many of the projects discussed before the revolution were realized. The orthographic reform was among them. The new norm was much more rigid and brooked no exceptions, unlike the pre-reform one.

Accounting for spellings: Ambisyllabic consonants in L2 German spelling discussions

ABSTRACTIn primary-level German writing instruction, spelling discussions (German: Rechtschreibgespräche) have become a well-established interactional method of teaching orthography, prompting the children to exchange their hypotheses about orthographic features of written words. Focusing on spellings of ambisyllabic consonants, this conversation-analytic paper reports about teacher-led and small-group spelling discussions of fourth-graders in a German school in Spain. As the data show, the students and the teacher approach and accomplish the task of accounting for the spellings of pre-selected words in various ways: by drawing on vowel quantity, by comparing phonetic minimal pairs, by applying morphologic extension, and by employing oral syllabifying as well as syllable scooping. The findings indicate that spelling discussions provide opportunities for teachers and students to negotiate their understanding of orthographic rules while displaying metalinguistic knowledge and practicing communicative skills. Illuminating how theoretic-didactic approaches to spelling instruction are put into practice in the classroom, the data reveal that the participants do not strictly adhere to one single approach, but creatively draw on various operations to account for a specific spelling. From these observations we derive insights for the training of (future) L1 and L2 German teachers.

ДЕФИС КАК НЕТРАДИЦИОННЫЙ ЗНАК ОРФОГРАФИИ

In this study we consider such a nonalphabetical sign of Russian orthography, as the hyphen, which was field of increased focus of the famous Kazakh scientist N.I. Gainullina. Attention is drawn to the fact that in the written works of today’s bachelor’s, master’s degree student and even postgraduate students are confused three characters: a dash as a punctuation mark, a hyphen as a sign of orthography and em dash, or “long dash”, which appeared as a result of the development of information technology and computer-network topics, the so-called “Internet” “long dash”. Based on the material of examples of writing Russian toponyms found that among the currently existing recommendations on the use of hyphen and contained in the current, known to all Russian speakers set of orthographic rules, there is no clear notation that would provide for its use for the division of complex toponyms; we highlight the reasons for the unresolved spelling of complex toponyms. It has been established that the “expressive purposes” of the hyphen usage, the statement of which contradicts the traditional spelling of the word, and it is proved that the use of the hyphen in various texts should be considered as a manifestation of the individual author’s handwriting features, when the main goal of the author of the text is achieved-to convey the proposed subtleties of the meaning of words and the elegance of the formula of self – expression.

Adverbial Derivation in Toba Batak Language: A Generative Transformational Study

The purpose of this article is to elaborate adverbial derivation in Toba Batak language from the view point of generative transformational study. The data were analysed by applying modified theory with reference to Halle’s model as the main theory. Therefore, there are six components of sets of generative transformational rules as modified theory in this study, i.e. List of Morphemes, Word Formation Rules, Filter, Orthographic Rules, Phonological Rules, and Dictionary. The method of this study is descriptive qualitative. The data were collected by using observation and interview. The collected data are voice-recordings and writings. The research findings show that adverbial derivation in Toba Batak language are done by attaching (1) prefix [par-], (2) prefix [maN-], (3) prefix [mar-], (4) affix combination [-umal-], and (5) affix combination [-umar-] to stems. The results of the affixation processes generate complex words which have new grammatical and lexical meanings. Phoneme assimilation takes place in morphological processes particularly with prefix [ma-]. The inflectional processes of attaching those affixes bring about phonological idiosyncrasy; therefore, such words must be processed in filter to generate acceptable words in Toba Batak language.