Armenian (or , /hɑjeˈɾen/, ISO 639-1 hy) comprises an independent branch of the Indo-European language family.1 Its earliest attested ancestor is Classical Armenian in the fifth century CE (see Godel ...1975; Thomson 1989; DeLisi 2015; Macak 2016). Modern Armenian is classified into two dialect families: Eastern Armenian (ISO 639-3 hye) and Western Armenian (ISO 639-3 hyw). Eastern Armenian is spoken in modern-day Armenia, and large speaker communities also exist in Georgia, Russia and Iran (shown in Figure 1). Western Armenian was historically spoken in the Ottoman Empire, but now includes varieties spoken throughout the Armenian diaspora in the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas (Donabédian 2018). There are substantial Western Armenian speaker communities in Turkey (Istanbul), Lebanon (Beirut), Syria (Aleppo, Damascus), California (Fresno, Los Angeles County), France (Marseilles), Australia (Sydney) and Argentina (Buenos Aires). There are also recent diaspora communities of Eastern Armenian speakers in California (Karapetian 2014), as well as communities of Western Armenian speakers in Armenia who escaped the Armenian genocide during World War I, who repatriated after World War II, or who fled the ongoing Syrian civil war. UNESCO lists Western Armenian as an endangered language in Turkey, and there are significant language promotion efforts in many diaspora communities that are intended to combat declining use by speaker generations born in the Americas and Europe (Al-Bataineh 2015; Chahinian & Bakalian 2016).
Learning to read takes time and it requires explicit instruction. Three decades of research has taught us a good deal about how children learn about the links between orthography and phonology during ...word reading development. However, we have learned less about the links that children build between orthographic form and meaning. This is surprising given that the goal of reading development must be for children to develop an orthographic system that allows meanings to be accessed quickly, reliably and efficiently from orthography. This review considers whether meaning-related information is used when children read words aloud, and asks what we know about how and when children make connections between form and meaning during the course of reading development.
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.
•Neural word information was more bilateral in high inversion-sensitive readers.•Word information was more left lateralized in low inversion-sensitive readers.•Lateralized pattern decoding negatively correlated with word inversion sensitivity.•Our multivariate but not a typical lateralization measure predicted variation.•Exploratory analyses found predictive lateralization in frontal and temporal areas.
With the overwhelming “Anglocentric” or “alphabetocentric” science of reading, the current review aimed to add to the science of reading acquisition from the perspective of abugidic writing system, ...distinct from the well‐research alphabetic writing system in multiple dimensions of orthographic complexity, as proposed by Daniels and Share (2018), such as linguistic distance, spatial arrangement and non‐linearity, and omission of phonological elements. Abugidic writing system is featured with scripts where each base consonant symbol denotes a consonant with an inherent vowel (/a/) and has billions of users in south Asia (e.g., India, Nepal, Sri Lanka), southeast Asia (e.g., Thailand, Laos, Cambodia), east Asia (parts of China) and Africa (Ethiopia and Eritrea). The current review describes the orthographic feature of Indic (Brahmi‐derived) and Ethiopic (Ge‘ez) scripts within the abugidic writing system and synthesizes existing findings on the literacy acquisition patterns specific to each script. Further, we elaborate on the multilingual and biscriptal language and literacy environment featured with the abugida‐writing societies and discuss the theoretical implication for considering multilingualism and biscriptality as an inseparable sociolinguistic factor when understanding the literacy acquisition of the abugidic writing system in particular and literacy in general.
With the overwhelming “Anglocentric” or “alphabetocentric” science of reading, the current review aimed to add to the science of reading acquisition from the perspective of abugidic writing system, distinct from the well‐research alphabetic writing system in multiple dimensions of orthographic complexity, as proposed by Daniels and Share (2018), such as linguistic distance, spatial arrangement and non‐linearity, and omission of phonological elements.
The effect of word predictability is well-documented in terms of local brain activation, but less is known about the functional connectivity among those regions associated with processing predictable ...words. Evidence from eye movement studies showed that the effect is much more pronounced in slow than in fast readers, suggesting that speed-impaired readers rely more on sentence context to compensate for their difficulties with visual word recognition. The present study aimed to investigate differences in functional connectivity of fast and slow readers within core regions associated with processing predictable words. We hypothesize a stronger synchronization between higher-order language areas, such as the left middle temporal (MTG) and inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), and the left occipito-temporal cortex (OTC) in slow readers. Our results show that slow readers exhibit more functional correlations among these connections; especially between the left IFG and OTC. We interpret our results in terms of the lexical quality hypothesis which postulates a stronger involvement of semantics on orthographic processing in (speed-)impaired readers.
Very few studies have directly compared reading acquisition across different orthographies. The authors examined the concurrent and longitudinal predictors of word decoding and reading fluency in ...children learning to read in an orthographically inconsistent language (English) and in an orthographically consistent language (Greek). One hundred ten English-speaking children and 70 Greek-speaking children attending Grade 1 were examined in measures of phonological awareness, phonological memory, rapid naming speed, orthographic processing, word decoding, and reading fluency. The same children were reassessed on word decoding and reading fluency measures when they were in Grade 2. The results of structural equation modeling indicated that both phonological and orthographic processing contributed uniquely to reading ability in Grades 1 and 2. However, the importance of these predictors was different in the two languages, particularly with respect to their effect on word decoding. The authors argue that the orthography that children are learning to read is an important factor that needs to be taken into account when models of reading development are being generalized across languages.
In early quranic Manuscripts the name of the prophet ʾIbrāhīm occurs in two different spellings either ابرهم or ابرهيم . These two spellings are spread haphazardly throughout the Quran. Close ...examination of the patterns in the manuscript, however, show that the distribution of this spelling is not random or up to the whims of the scribe. The location where one spelling or the other occurs is highly correlated across the early manuscripts. Moreover, the location of one spelling or the other is highly correlated to where the quranic reader Hišām reads the name as ʾIbrāhām or ʾIbrāhīm. This paper argues that this is not because these manuscripts have been written in the reading of Hišām, but rather that Hišām based his reading on the rasm of the quranic text.
Abstract
Against the backdrop of the societal differentiation of literacy, the paper investigates spelling variation in digital written communication beyond the binary paradigm of standard and ...nonstandard. To this end, the paper proposes a formal classification of digital spelling variants and then focuses on the socio-communicative functions of these variants in usage. Theoretically grounded in the notions of
register
and
social indexicality
, the paper discusses how spelling variants are metapragmatically ordered by social actors and deployed in text-messaging interactions in order to indicate interpretive context. To investigate these phenomena holistically, the paper furthermore presents a tripartite research framework that addresses digital writing regarding its I) structural variants, II) communicative practice, and III) reflexive awareness. Afterwards, this methodological approach is applied empirically. This is done based on a data set that includes samples of everyday literacy by 23 German adolescents: informal WhatsApp texting, on the one hand, formal school essays on the other. The exemplary analyses focus on phonostylistic spellings (e. g. elisions such as <ich hab> instead of <ich habe>) and graphostylistic spellings (e. g. graphemic substitutions such as <daß> instead of ) in these WhatsApp interactions, reconstructing the metapragmatic status of standard orthography in digital writing. By combining structure-oriented, interactional, and ethnographic perspectives, the paper seeks a disciplinary dialogue by relating concepts of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology not only to research fields of media linguistics but also to research on writing systems.
There has been debate on whether phonological deficits explain reading difficulty in Chinese, since Chinese is a logographic language which does not employ grapheme-phoneme-correspondence rules and ...remote memorization seems to be the main method to acquire reading. In the current study, we present neuroimaging evidence that the phonological deficit is also a signature of Chinese dyslexia. Specifically, we found that Chinese children with dyslexia (DD) showed reduced brain activation in the left dorsal inferior frontal gyrus (dIFG) when compared to both age-matched controls (AC) and reading-matched controls (RC) during an auditory rhyming judgment task. This suggests that the phonological processing deficit in this region may be a signature of dyslexia in Chinese, rather than a difference due to task performance or reading ability, which was matched on DD and RC. At exactly the same region of the left dIFG, we found a positive correlation between brain activation and reading skill in DD, suggesting that the phonological deficit is associated with the severity of dyslexia. We also found increased brain activation in the right precentral gyrus in DD than both AC and RC, suggesting a compensation of reliance on articulation. Functional connectivity analyses revealed that DD had a weaker connection between the left superior temporal gyrus (STG) and fusiform gyrus (FG) than the two control groups, suggesting that the reduced connection between phonology and orthography is another neural signature of dyslexia. In contrast, DD showed greater connectivity between the left dIFG and the left inferior parietal lobule (IPL) than both control groups, suggesting a reduced segregation between the language network and default mode network in dyslexic children. We also found that connectivity between the left STG and the left dIFG was sensitive to task performance and/or reading skill rather than being dyslexic or not, because AC was greater than both RC and DD, while the connectivity between the left middle occipital gyrus (MOG) and left STG was sensitive to age, because both AC and DD were greater than RC. In summary, our study provides the very first neurological evidence of phonological deficits in Chinese developmental dyslexia and we successfully distinguished variations of brain activity/functional connectivity due to age, performance, and dyslexia by comparing AC, RC, and DD.
•Phonological deficit is characterized by less activation in the left dIFG.•Dyslexia is associated with weaker functional connectivity from the left STG to FG.•Task performance effect was identified by comparing AC to DD and RC.•Age effect was identified by comparing RC to AC and DD.
How a child's brain develops specialization for print is poorly understood. One longstanding account is selective neuronal tuning to regularity of visual-orthographic features, which predicts a ...monotonically increased neural activation for inputs with higher regularity during development. However, we observed a robust interaction between a stimulus' orthographic regularity (bottom-up input) and children's lexical classification ability (top-down prediction): N1 response, which is the first negative component of the event-related potential (ERP) occurring at posterior electrodes, was stronger to lower-regularity stimuli, but only in children who were less efficient in lexically classifying these stimuli (high prediction error). In contrast, N1 responses were reduced to lower-regularity stimuli in children who showed high efficiency of lexical classification (low prediction error). The modulation of children's lexical classification efficiency on their neural responses to orthographic stimuli supports the predictive coding account of neural processes of reading.
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