Vowel Spelling Research Articles

Students' Difficulties in Spelling Vowels: Case Study

This paper aims to reflect the difficulties students have in spelling the vowels of the Albanian language. The unified spelling of a language, in our case the Albanian language, is an expression of the crystallization of the national literary norm in all the main links of the phonetic, grammatical, word-forming and lexical structure. It reflects the current state and general trends of the development of our literary language. Given that the basic principle of Albanian spelling is the phonetic principle and seeing the constant spelling errors of Albanian speakers in the use of vowels, we conducted research with primary school students in rural areas, to see the most common errors frequency in vowel spelling. Our goal was to see the differences between students whose parents have primary education and those with higher education. Through this research we have also seen the reasons that lead to the impossibility of writing correctly and how the vowels should be written in different words. Our hypothesis is that children of parents with primary education make more mistakes in vowel spelling than children of parents with high education. We have conducted the research through the theoretical, comparative method, distribution of questionnaires and data analysis. The results have shown that parents' education does not affect children's knowledge of spelling. Received: 27 August 2024 / Accepted: 28 October 2024 / Published: 05 November 2024

The Effect of Phonetic Vowel Spelling Variances on Singers' Performed Vowel

The purpose of this study was to examine the extent to which various phonetic spellings of a single vowel can influence singers' performed vowel, and to explore whether the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) may provide an alternative to phonetic spelling in sheet music. I prepared two short, sight-singable melodies of similar range and difficulty; one had vowels written as IPA symbols under the staff, including the /u/ vowel, while the other had the vowels written out phonetically, including two occurrences of the /u/ vowel, spelled in two different ways ("oo" and "ooh"). Each participant (N=41) performed both conditions in a randomized order. I recorded their performances and used the linguistics software Praat to analyze the frequencies of the first and second formants (F1 and F2) for each condition. I found no significant differences in formant frequencies between the conditions. In their exit survey responses, many participants indicated that they recognized a difference in the pronunciation of "oo" and "ooh." Participants also indicated a slight, though not significant, preference for phonetic spelling over IPA. These results suggest that while some singers believe that "oo" and "ooh" should be sung differently, this belief is not reflected in their performance. Results also suggest that IPA is no better at eliciting a specific pronunciation than either phonetic spelling, and is not recommended as a replacement to phonetic spelling in sheet music. I discuss the implications of these findings for choral teachers and composers, and suggest avenues for further research.

Vowel Blindness and Gender: The Case of ESL Learners at the University of Jeddah

Because vocabulary knowledge is considered the building block of language learning, any difficulties concerned with vocabulary can harm the overall vocabulary acquisition process. Literature suggests that native Arabic speakers struggle to notice vowels while reading English texts. This can result from the differences between L1 and L2 linguistic systems or the negative transfer of L1 processing routines to the L2 in their attempt to process the L2 forms. This study investigates this problem and whether gender affects this phenomenon or not. It used a test on Twenty-eight participants to examine the effect of gender on vowel blindness, which type of vowels (short or long vowels) are more problematic, and the kinds of vowel spelling errors that are easily noticed when processing vowels. The results showed that gender does not affect vowel blindness in a significant way. In other words, the overall results showed that the role of gender cannot be considered to have a significant effect. Thus, male and female students both struggled to deal with short vowels equally. However, males also showed difficulties regarding the long vowels. The research also revealed that missing vowel spelling errors are salient and more likely to be noticed while processing vowels for both genders.

MODERN ASPECTS OF STUDYING RUSSIAN TERMINOLOGY BY INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS AT THE PREPARATORY DEPARTMENT IN A TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY

In this study, one of the aspects of teaching Russian as an international language, namely the teaching of mathematical terms in the preparatory department of a technical university in Russia, is considered. The relevance of this subject has arisen due to the growing number of international students in Russian universities and the need for them to master the Russian language as soon as possible to continue their studies at Russian universities. This work aims to describe the learning process of Russian scientific vocabulary and terminology of technical disciplines, especially the language of mathematics, by international students from the countries of the former Soviet Union studying at the Preparatory Department of Tomsk State University of Architecture and Civil Engineering. The complexity of mastering scientific vocabulary in Russian arises from the characteristic differences between Russian and Turkic languages. A linguistic experiment was conducted in which students heard and wrote down scientific terms, words, and phrases in Russian. Students were given a dictation test rich in scientific vocabulary. The results have been gathered, and numerous errors in spelling scientific terms have been pointed out. Studies in Russian universities take place mainly in Russian, with active use of scientific vocabulary, which is extremely difficult for people who are just beginning to learn Russian. After correcting the mistakes and explaining the correct spelling of the words, the dictation is repeated. The results obtained are compared. The features of deviations from the norm are identified, described, and structured, and options for working on the implementation of a program for the development of normative writing skills in international students are suggested. For example, it is quite challenging to determine the boundaries of a word, to identify differences between prefixes and prepositions, the normative spelling of vowels in the endings of nouns, adjectives, and verbs, and the spelling of fricative consonants.

Probing into the formation of vowel sounds in English words

Learning the sound system of a language is an interesting and challenging task. Understanding the formation of speech sounds requires systematic investigation on the correlation between spellings and their corresponding sounds. This article attempts to probe into the formation of basic vowel sounds of English. The article writer has endeavored to take divergent vowel spellings that form particular vowel sounds. The readers are provided with a brief glimpse about the four term description of the vowel sounds. How an individual vowel sound is produced is described briefly and from where it is produced is shown in the figure. This article is important to the readers who are interested in learning in speech sounds of English.

With a front Vowel Spelling of Enclitic Ok in the Tuñuquq Inscriptions and Reinterpretation of Some Lines (11 = I/S 4, 16 = I/S 9, 21 = I/E 4 and 30 = I/N 6)

The new readings and interpretations about the Old Turkic Inscriptions are very valuable in terms of Old Turkic. The Tuñuquq inscriptions are an invaluable treasure in literary and historical terms. The inscriptions were discovered in 1897 by Y. N. Klements. Two years after their discovery, Radloff published the first scholarly edition of the Tuñuquq inscriptions (1899). They were read again and interpreted by many philologists after the first edition. In the Tuñuquq inscriptions, the enclitic Ok occurred in form {-k} and kök in four places (Lines 11, 16, 21, 30). After evaluating the previous interpretations about these four places in the article, a new interpretation will be put forward. As a result, it will be questioned whether the enclitic Ok has such a form like kök or {-k}.

Language Interference in Teaching English Diphthongs to Uzbek Learners

The interference of vowels in teaching English has been studied on the examples of languages such as Urdu, Russian, and Sundan, in which the causes of the interference of vowels have been revealed. This research is devoted to the problem of linguistic interference in the process of teaching the pronunciation of English diphthongs and their written expressions to Uzbek native speakers. The aim of the study is to identify the interference of diphthongs caused by the interaction of the Uzbek and English languages and develop a method to eliminate them. The comparative-contrastive method has been used to determine the interference of diphthongs. The research distinguishes two types of linguistic interference associated with teaching diphthongs. They are the phonetic-phonological and orthographic interference of diphthongs. The reasons for appearing of these types of interference are explained by convincing examples. The research proposes a new method to eliminate the phonetic-phonological and orthographic interference of diphthongs in teaching English to Uzbek native speakers. This method is called Vowel Spelling and Pronunciation. The application of new method and its advantages are explained in detail. The research is concluded that the use of the Vowel Spelling and Pronunciation method is fruitful in the effective teaching of English diphthongs to the Uzbek audience.

Regionale variatie in Middelnederlandse spellingsystemen

In this article I will focus on the dialect implications on vowel spelling in the 14th Century, which is before the onset of (spelling) standardisation processes that were spurred on by the development of printing. Central in my research is the question what historical sounds can be represented by the graphemes in use in nine cities. My method involves analysing and cataloguing grapheme-phoneme relationships of a selection of tokens taken from the fourteenth Century charter corpus CRM (Corpus Van Reenen – Mulder). More precisely, I want to find out to what extent vowel graphemes convey phonetic variation accurately across the regions.

Text Filtering through Multi-Pattern Matching: A Case Study of Wu–Manber–Uy on the Language of Uyghur

Given its generality in applications and its high time-efficiency on big data-sets, in recent years, the technique of text filtering through pattern matching has been attracting increasing attention from the field of information retrieval and Natural language Processing (NLP) research communities at large. That being the case, however, it has yet to be seen how this technique and its algorithms, (e.g., Wu–Manber, which is also considered in this paper) can be applied and adopted properly and effectively to Uyghur, a low-resource language that is mostly spoken by the ethnic Uyghur group with a population of more than eleven-million in Xinjiang, China. We observe that technically, the challenge is mainly caused by two factors: (1) Vowel weakening and (2) mismatching in semantics between affixes and stems. Accordingly, in this paper, we propose Wu–Manber–Uy, a variant of an improvement to Wu–Manber, dedicated particularly for working on the Uyghur language. Wu–Manber–Uy implements a stem deformation-based pattern expansion strategy, specifically for reducing the mismatching of patterns caused by vowel weakening and spelling errors. A two-way strategy that applies invigilation and control on the change of lexical meaning of stems during word-building is also used in Wu–Manber–Uy. Extra consideration with respect to Word2vec and the dictionary are incorporated into the system for processing Uyghur. The experimental results we have obtained consistently demonstrate the high performance of Wu–Manber–Uy.

Spelling patterns of German 4th graders in French vowels: insights into spelling solutions within and across two alphabetic writing systems

Cross-language transfer in vowel spelling is difficult to detect because the relation between a vowel and its grapheme is often ambiguous within a writing system and the interpretation of transfer ...

Overruled!: Implicit cues rather than an orthographic rule determine Dutch children's vowel spelling

This study addressed the question why vowel spelling acquisition is relatively difficult for young Dutch spellers. A spelling rule guides vowel spelling, but implicit cues could also play a role. We evaluated the role of phonology, morphology, and orthography. Grade 1 (N = 113) and 2 (N = 59) children were presented with dictations of real and pseudowords differing in the degree of consistency and familiarity. Correct scores of consistent vowel spelling in Grade 1 and 2 students were near ceiling, whereas those for inconsistent vowels were low, even in Grade 2 children, who have had explicit instruction of the spelling rule. Correct scores were affected by phonological and morphological consistency, and orthographic familiarity. Effects of these implicit cues were even more pronounced in Grade 2. Findings indicate that vowel length spelling is difficult to acquire because the explicit spelling rule is overruled by various sources of implicit information.

Vowel Instruction for Spelling Enhancement of Arabic-Speaking Learners of English

Word spellings are often a common linguistic issue among Arabic-speaking learners of English, and English vowels are one of the most difficult to resolve. Therefore, the study presented vowel instruction as an intervention to address this issue by determining its effect on the spelling performance on monosyllables and bi-syllables. Vowel instruction sessions were then offered to 15 university freshman students for two months. Instructional strategies consisted of teaching vowel pronunciation, vowel letter-to-sound relationships, vowel spelling patterns, word-breaking, and providing various spelling opportunities. To measure overall spelling performance, pre-test and post-test on vowel spellings were conducted which revealed a significant increase in the mean scores. This suggests that vowel instruction was facilitative in the improved spelling performance on monosyllabic and bi-syllabic words, with more misspellings in the latter than in the former. The strategies used were generally perceived as beneficial, and it is recommended that including them in language lessons could improve vowel spelling skill and minimize English vowel confusions. Moreover, constant exposure of learners to many English words and more spelling activities are still necessary for better English vowel recognition and whole word spelling.

Spelling It Out, One por Uno: Patterns of Emergent Bilinguals in a Dual Language Classroom

The extant research literature on emergent bilingual spelling focuses on developmental patterns and the interference of first language with second language. The purpose of this article is to provide teachers with an alternate view of emergent bilingual spelling in an effort to influence spelling instruction in the classroom. Writing samples produced by second‐grade students in a dual language program were analyzed to gain insight into the spelling development of emergent bilinguals. Strikingly, there was an inverse relationship between Spanish‐influenced errors and English approximations as the school year progressed. In other words, as fluency in English orthography increased, Spanish‐influenced errors decreased. Furthermore, emergent bilinguals committed vowel spelling errors throughout the school year. The researchers discuss implications for classroom instruction in the form of a process that teachers can use to teach English spelling. Additionally, a list of common spelling errors is provided. The authors maintain that spelling errors are not a result of interference but are part of the developmental process in learning English that can be addressed through individualized and/or group instruction.

Reconstructing the Khitan vowel system and vowel spelling rule through the Khitan Small Script

This paper reconstructs the Khitan vowel system by analysing materials concerning the Khitan Small Script. First, the approximate phonetic values of the graphemes were determined by systematically comparing Khitan transcriptions of Chinese words with their original Chinese sounds and by analysing Khitan rhymes. Next, an exhaustive survey of two adjacent graphemes in a corpus elucidated the script’s spelling rule and thus were the accurate phonetic values determined. Finally, a comparative study based on the reconstructed values established regular vowel correspondences between Khitan and Mongolian. In conclusion, the author presents twelve Khitan vowel phonemes that are distinguished by four vocalic features.

Three Southern shibboleths

Over the course of the long eighteenth century, a distinct Southern Dutch linguistic identity emerged in the region now known as Flanders, and spelling features are at the heart of this developing linguistic autonomy. By analyzing eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century normative and metalinguistic comments about three highly salient spelling variables (the spelling of the long vowelsaanduin closed syllables, the ending 〈-n〉 or 〈-ø〉 in masculine adnominals, and the orthographic representation of etymologically differenteandosounds), we will show how seemingly insignificant features increasingly came to be portrayed as representing an unbridgeable linguistic gap between the Northern and Southern Low Countries. At the time of the political reunion of both parts of the Dutch speaking territories (1815–1830), this perceived gap then gave rise to different voices rejecting or embracing these shibboleths of linguistic ‘Southernness’, indicating how spelling features came to represent conflicting identities.

Effects of orthographic forms on pronunciation in experienced instructed second language learners

ABSTRACTIn spite of burgeoning evidence that the orthographic forms (“spellings”) of second language (L2) words affect L2 learners’ pronunciation, little is known about the pronunciation of known words in experienced learners. In a series of four studies, we investigated various orthographic effects on the pronunciation of L2 English words in instructed learners with 10 years’ experience of learning English. Participants were native users of the phonologically transparent Italian writing system. Study 1 investigated the pronunciation of “silent letters,” using a word-reading task and a word-repetition task. Study 2 examined the effects of vowel spelling on vowel duration, namely, whether L2 speakers produce the same target vowel as longer when it is spelled with a vowel digraph than with a singleton letter. Study 3 explored the effects of the morphemic spelling of the past tense marker <ed> using a verb paradigm-production task. Study 4 tested whether L2 speakers produce homophonic words differently when they are spelled differently. Results confirmed that orthographic forms affect experienced instructed learners’ pronunciation of known words, albeit less so in immediate word repetition than in reading-aloud tasks.

The impact of dictation practice on Turkish as a foreign language learners writing skills

The purpose of this study is to learn about the impact of dictation practice on B1 level Turkish as a foreign language learners’ writing skills. In this study, a pretest-posttest quasi-experimental design with control group was used. The study was carried out with 24 B1 level students enrolled in Gaziantep University Turkish and Foreign Languages Research and Application Center (TOMER). Both experimental and control groups consisted of 12 students. The data were analyzed by using both content analysis and descriptive statistics (frequency distribution).The results of the study revealed that students in experimental group made statistically significant gains in terms of word count (25%), vowel spelling mistakes (32%) and consonant spelling mistakes (44.5%). The results of the current study indicated that dictation practices have positive impacts on the ratios of students’ perceived word counts and their phonemic perceptions. In the light of these results, some practical recommendations and suggestions to improve TFL learners’ listening and writing skills were presented. Key words: Dictation, Teaching Turkish as a Foreign Language, writing skill.

Orthographic Consistency Affects Spoken Word Recognition at Different Grain-Sizes

A number of previous studies found that the consistency of sound-to-spelling mappings (feedback consistency) affects spoken word recognition. In auditory lexical decision experiments, words that can only be spelled one way are recognized faster than words with multiple potential spellings. Previous studies demonstrated this by manipulating feedback consistency of rhymes. The present lexical decision study, done in English, manipulated the spelling of individual vowels within consistent rhymes. Participants recognized words with consistent rhymes where the vowel has the most typical spelling (e.g., lobe) faster than words with consistent rhymes where the vowel has a less typical spelling (e.g., loaf). The present study extends previous literature by showing that auditory word recognition is affected by orthographic regularities at different grain sizes, just like written word recognition and spelling. The theoretical and methodological implications for future research in spoken word recognition are discussed.

Vowel representations in the invented spellings of Spanish–English bilingual kindergartners

The study compared the invented spelling of vowels in kindergarten native Spanish speaking children with that of English monolinguals. It examined whether, after receiving phonics instruction for short vowels, the spelling of native Spanish-speaking kindergartners would contain phonological errors that were influenced by their first language. Results showed no differences between the two groups on the number of correct short vowel spellings, even though the sounds for four of the five English short vowels do not exist in Spanish. By contrast, differences were observed in the representation of long vowels with a higher rate of error among ELLs. The students had not received explicit instruction in long vowels. ELLs appeared to be trying to represent the diphthongized nature of some English long vowels by spelling long vowels with more than one vowel. The results support the authors’ hypothesis that kindergarten phonics instruction had an impact on the invented spellings of new second language vowel phonemes.

Instruction matters: spelling of vowels by children in England and the US

Letter names are stressed in informal and formal literacy instruction with young children in the US, whereas letters sounds are stressed in England. We examined the impact of these differences on English children of about 5 and 6 years of age (in reception year and Year 1, respectively) and US 6 year olds (in kindergarten). Children in both countries spelled short vowels, as in bag, more accurately than long vowels, as in gate. The superiority for short vowels was larger for children from England, consistent with the instructional emphasis on letter sounds. Errors such as gat for words with long vowels such as gate were more common among US children, reflecting these children's use of vowels' names as a guide to spelling. The English children's performance on a letter knowledge task was influenced by the fact that they are often taught letter sounds with reference to lowercase letters and letter names with reference to uppercase letters, and their spellings showed some effects of this practice. Although emphasis on letter sounds as opposed to letter names influences children's patterns of performance and types of errors, it does not make the difficult English writing system markedly easier to master.