This paper presents the sociolinguistic background and phoneme inventory of Para Naga, ethnonym Jejara, spoken in Northwest Myanmar. The phoneme-grapheme correspondences of the orthography based on ...the phonological analysis and the history of orthography development of this lesser known and previously unwritten language are presented, too. A word list, a short glossed text in phonological and orthographic representation, and evidence of contrast with phoneme distribution charts are provided in the Appendix.
Tolkien was not only a successful author of one of the most complex fantasy lore available in Western literature, but he was also a gifted philologist whose interests ranged from the most disparaged ...languages, such as Germanic languages, Finnish, Celtic languages and also Latin and Greek. For the creation of his glottopoietic masterpieces – Quenya and Sindarin – he followed an a posteriori process, moving from the templates represented by natural languages, such as Finnish, Germanic languages, Welsh and also Classical languages. Focussing on Quenya, in particular, it is noticeable how this invented language possesses a few relevant features that makes it similar to Latin not only according to the narrowest linguistic perspective but also according to a broader perspective, including the sociolinguistic viewpoint. Some of these features have been summarized and presented in this paper, showing how Tolkien not only reproduced – according to his phonoaesthetic taste – linguistic feature that were closer to Latin than to any other language, but he also reproduced and mimicked the relationships that Latin had with other languages during different periods of its existence.
We present a meta-analysis to test the validity of the Simple View of Reading Gough & Tunmer (Remedial and Special Education, 7:6—10, 1986) for beginner readers of English and other, more ...transparent, orthographies. Our meta-analytic approach established that the relative influence of decoding and linguistic comprehension on reading comprehension is different for readers of different types of orthography during the course of early reading development. Furthermore, we identified key differences in the relations among different measures of decoding and reading comprehension between readers of English and other more transparent orthographies. We discuss the implications for reading instruction and the diagnosis of reading difficulties, as well as our theoretical understanding of how component skills influence reading comprehension level.
It is widely acknowledged that opaque orthographies place additional demands on learning, often requiring many years to fully acquire. It is less widely recognized, however, that such opacity may ...offer certain benefits in the context of reading. For example, heterographic homophones such as ⟨knight⟩ and ⟨night⟩ (words that sound the same but which are spelled differently) impose additional costs in learning but reduce ambiguity in reading. Here, we consider the possibility that—left to evolve freely—writing systems will sometimes choose to forego some simplicity for the sake of informativeness when there is functional pressure to do so. We investigate this hypothesis by simulating the evolution of orthography as it is transmitted from one generation to the next, both with and without a communicative pressure for ambiguity avoidance. In addition, we consider two mechanisms by which informative heterography might be selected for: differentiation, in which new spellings are created to differentiate meaning (e.g., ⟨lite⟩ vs. ⟨light⟩), and conservation, in which heterography arises as a byproduct of sound change (e.g., ⟨meat⟩ vs. ⟨meet⟩). Under pressure from learning alone, orthographic systems become transparent, but when combined with communicative pressure, they tend to favor some additional informativeness. Nevertheless, our findings also suggest that, in the long term, simpler, transparent spellings may be preferred in the absence of top-down explicit teaching.
Learning to read in English Philip H. K. Seymour; Lynne G. Duncan
Ψυχολογία: το Περιοδικό της Ελληνικής Ψυχολογικής Εταιρείας,
10/2020, Letnik:
8, Številka:
3
Journal Article
It is generally well accepted that proficient reading requires the assimilation of myriad statistical regularities present in the writing system, including in particular the correspondences between ...words' orthographic and phonological forms. There is considerably less agreement, however, as to how to quantify these regularities. Here we present a comprehensive approach for this quantification using tools from Information Theory. We start by providing a glossary of the relevant information-theoretic metrics, with simplified examples showing their potential in assessing orthographic-phonological regularities. We specifically highlight the flexibility of our approach in quantifying information under different contexts (i.e., context-independent and dependent readings) and in different types of mappings (e.g., orthography-to-phonology and phonology-to-orthography). Then, we use these information-theoretic measures to assess real-world orthographic-phonological regularities of 10,093 mono-syllabic English words and examine whether these measures predict inter-item variability in accuracy and response times using available large-scale datasets of naming and lexical decision tasks. Together, the analyses demonstrate how information-theoretical measures can be used to quantify orthographical-phonological correspondences, and show that they capture variance in reading performance that is not accounted for by existing measures. We discuss the similarities and differences between the current framework and previous approaches as well as future directions towards understanding how the statistical regularities embedded in a writing system impact reading and reading acquisition.
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