•Evidence from within-language comparisons of orthographic depth theory in Japanese.•Reconciled the arguments whether kanji has higher semantic transparency than kana.•Objectively demonstrated the ...radical-level orthographic-semantic consistency in Japanese.•Convergent evidence of Monte Carlo simulation, Word2Vec, neural network, & human data.•Support for a teaching practice to emphasize the radical-level semantic transparency.
The orthographic depth theory assumes that reading “deep” orthographies relies on lexical semantics more than “shallow” orthographies. Although Japanese kanji is a representative “deep” case, some scholars argue that kanji reading does not particularly recruit more lexical semantics than kana (the system of syllabic writing used for Japanese consisting of two forms). To reconcile this inconsistency, we ran a Monte Carlo simulation and found that orthographic neighbors in kanji had higher semantic similarities than those in kana. We further conducted a semantic space analysis (‘Word2Vec’) and showed that there was significant radical-level orthographic-semantic consistency in kanji characters. Furthermore, we demonstrated that this consistency had a positive effect on language performance in models (in terms of next-character prediction) and humans (in terms of semantic plausibility judgment). These findings suggest that radicals in kanji may help children to efficiently learn to use the vast number of characters present in Japanese.
Language skills play an important role in mathematics development. Students (7 to 10 years of age) learning school mathematics either in the same language used at home (first-language learners; n = ...103) or in a different language (second-language learners; n = 57) participated in the study. Relations among cognitive skills (i.e., receptive vocabulary, working memory, quantitative skills), domain-specific language skills (i.e., mathematical vocabulary, mathematical orthography), word-problem solving, arithmetic fluency, and word reading were investigated. Second-language learners had lower scores on measures with strong language components (i.e., receptive vocabulary, subitizing, and word-problem solving) than first-language learners, whereas they performed equally well on other tasks. Mathematical vocabulary and receptive vocabulary contributed to word-problem solving success for first-language learners, whereas only receptive vocabulary in the language of instruction related to mathematical outcomes for second-language learners. Mathematical vocabulary was related to arithmetic fluency for both groups, but mathematical orthography was not. For both groups, students' word reading was predicted by receptive vocabulary but not by quantitative skills, highlighting the domain-specific nature of these skills. These findings have implications for supporting mathematical learning in second-language students.
Educational Impact and Implications StatementHow do language skills affect mathematics for second-language learners? Vocabulary skills in the instructional language were more strongly related to word-problem solving and arithmetic skills for second- than first-language learners. Teachers of second-language learners may need to adapt materials or reduce language demands so that all students have equal opportunity to develop competent mathematical skills. For all students, explicit instruction on mathematical vocabulary and mathematical orthography may support their mathematical competency.
El propósito de este trabajo es hacer un estudio historiográfico del proceso de oficialización de la ortografía española en el siglo XIX. Con base en una serie de publicaciones de la prensa española ...durante la primera mitad de ese siglo, se pretende evaluar el alcance de las propuestas reformistas decimonónicas y analizar, desde la conjunción de las perspectivas interna y externa de la historiografía lingüística, el papel de los maestros en este proceso, junto al de la prensa, que, como foro de opinión pública, no sólo sirve de testigo, sino también de difusor y catalizador de toda esta empresa que conduce a la oficialización de la ortografía académica.
This article offers a historiographic study of the officialization of Spanish orthography in the 19th century. By examining the Spanish press during the first half of the 19th century, we intended to evaluate the significance of the proposals for reform put forward during this period. Viewing linguistic historiography from both an internal and external perspective, we analyse the role of teachers as well as that of the press which, as a forum for public opinion, not only reflects the process that leads to the formalization of academic orthography, but also serves to broadcast and accelerate this process.
This study examined the dynamic relationships among the components of the Simple View of Reading (SVR) in a transparent orthography (Finnish) and the predictive value of cognitive skills ...(phonological awareness, letter knowledge, rapid naming, and vocabulary) on the SVR components. Altogether, 1,815 Finnish children were followed from kindergarten to Grade 3. Their cognitive skills were assessed in kindergarten, listening comprehension and reading fluency in Grades 1 and 2, and reading comprehension in Grades 1–3. Reading fluency and listening comprehension accounted for 37% of the variance in reading comprehension in Grade 2 and 28% in Grade 3. The direct effect of reading fluency on reading comprehension disappeared after Grade 1, whereas the effect of listening comprehension remained significant across time. Cognitive skills predicted reading comprehension mainly indirectly via listening comprehension and reading fluency in Grade 1. These findings support the validity of the SVR model in the context of a transparent orthography, but they also show that the direct effect of reading fluency on reading comprehension wanes after the early school years.
Words that sound similar tend to have similar meanings, at a distributed, sub-symbolic level (Monaghan, Shillcock, Christiansen, & Kirby, 2014). We extend this paradigm for measuring systematicity to ...letters and their canonical pronunciations. We confirm that orthographies that were consciously constructed to be systematic (Korean and two shorthand writing systems) yield significant correlations between visual distances between characters and the corresponding phonological distances between canonical pronunciations. We then extend the approach to Arabic, Hebrew, and English and show that letters that look similar tend to sound similar in their canonical pronunciations. We indicate some of the implications for education, and for understanding typical and atypical reading. By using different visual distance metrics we distinguish between symbol-based (Korean, shorthand) and effort-based (Arabic, Hebrew, English) grapho-phonemic systematicity. We reinterpret existing demonstrations of phono-semantic systematicity in terms of cognitive effort.
Orthography–semantics consistency (OSC) is a measure that quantifies the degree of semantic relatedness between a word and its orthographic relatives. OSC is computed as the frequency-weighted ...average semantic similarity between the meaning of a given word and the meanings of all the words containing that very same orthographic string, as captured by distributional semantic models. We present a resource including optimized estimates of OSC for 15,017 English words. In a series of analyses, we provide a progressive optimization of the OSC variable. We show that computing OSC from word-embeddings models (in place of traditional count models), limiting preprocessing of the corpus used for inducing semantic vectors (in particular, avoiding part-of-speech tagging and lemmatization), and relying on a wider pool of orthographic relatives provide better performance for the measure in a lexical-processing task. We further show that OSC is an important and significant predictor of reaction times in visual word recognition and word naming, one that correlates only weakly with other psycholinguistic variables (e.g., family size, word frequency), indicating that it captures a novel source of variance in lexical access. Finally, some theoretical and methodological implications are discussed of adopting OSC as one of the predictors of reaction times in studies of visual word recognition.
Visual-verbal paired-associate learning (PAL) is thought to be related to reading acquisition and, more specifically, to word reading skills. To date, the uniqueness and strength of this relationship ...has remained unclear because most studies have been conducted in opaque orthographies such as English, and few studies have controlled for all of the strongest cognitive and linguistic predictors of reading acquisition. Critically, PAL is a complex task involving different components, and there is still no consensus on which is more involved, crossmodal associative learning or verbal learning, although the latter has received much support in the literature. The first aim of this study was to test the unique contribution of PAL in French, which has an intermediate level of orthographic transparency compared to other languages. The second aim of this study was to disentangle the mechanisms that account for this relationship. A battery of reading and reading-related tests as well as a visual-verbal PAL task were administered to 227 French children in first and second grade. The results showed that PAL makes a unique contribution to word reading in French, but not to nonword reading scores, over and above the strongest language predictors of reading: phonological awareness, rapid automatic naming, short-term phonological memory, vocabulary, and age. Our data do not support the putative involvement of the crossmodal associative learning mechanism. We therefore suggest that verbal learning explains the entire contribution of PAL.
Educational Impact and Implications StatementExamining the relationship between cognitive abilities and reading skills in young readers provides an insight into reading mechanisms. This article focused on a specific task: visual-verbal paired-associate learning. The performance on this task has been shown to be correlated with the reading of words in opaque orthographies (mainly English). We wondered whether this relationship also exists at the onset of literacy (first and second grade) in French children and which mechanisms account for it. Our results showed that visual-verbal paired-associate learning is a weak but significant correlate of word reading in French. Verbal learning abilities seem to be at the core of this relationship and may support reading for words whose decoding is difficult (i.e., irregular words and words encompassing contextual graphemes). Learning the "spelling pronunciation" of these words could potentially account for this support and provide applications in educational settings.
Esta investigación pretende determinar las repercusiones inmediatas que en España tiene la oficialización de la ortografía académica de 1844 en las aspiraciones de los maestros neógrafos que, tras un ...breve periodo de silencio, encuentran a partir de los años sesenta nuevas vías de reivindicación en la prensa pedagógica, donde se erigen como símbolo de la lucha contra la ortografía académica. El Magisterio. Periódico de educación y enseñanza, Anales de primera enseñanza, Boletín de Primera Enseñanza de la provincia de Sala?nanca y La conciliación. Revista de primera enseñanza son testigos de las diferentes polémicas entre neógrafos y academicistas, en las que autores como Ruiz Morote, Rosa y Arroyo y Basilio Tirado, entre otros, demandan unidad entre los maestros para que sus peticiones de reforma ortográfica sean aceptadas y ejecutadas por la Academia, elevada ahora a única autoridad en el asunto. En este trabajo se analiza el contenido de todas estas acciones neógrafas y su repercusión tanto en las actuaciones de la RAE a partir de la década de los sesenta como en la adopción de las diferentes medidas que, a partir del denominado sexenio democrático, son adoptadas en el plano lingüístico y educativo para los años sucesivos. Palabras clave: Historiografía lingüística, ortografía española, prensa española, siglo XIX, Real Academia Española, neografía. This research aims to determine the immediate repercussions that the officialization of the academic orthography in 1844 has on the hopes of neographers in Spain. After a brief period of quiet, they find new ways of vindication in the pedagogical press, where they become as symbol of the fight against academic orthography El Magisterio. Periódico de educación y enseñanza, Anales de primera enseñanza, Boletín de Primera Enseñanza de la provincia de Salamanca and La conciliación. Revista de primera enseñanza are witnesses of the different controversies between neographers and academicians, in which authors like Ruiz Morote, Rosa y Arroyo and Basilio Tirado demand unity among the teachers so that their requests for orthographic reform are accepted and executed by the Academy, the only authority in the matter. This paper analyses the content of all these reformist actions and their impact both on the actions of the RAE from the 1960s onwards and on the adoption of the different measures that will emerge on linguistic and educational levels of the following years, from the so-called six democratic. Keywords: Linguistic Historiography, Spanish orthography, Spanish press, 19th century, Spanish Royal Academy, neography.
This volume provides a space for the development of dialogue between dialectologists, language community activists, and other researchers working on the development of orthographies regarding issues ...that arise during the creation of writing systems in places where there is dialect variation and an absence of writing systems, or where there is a writing system for a national language but not for the particular related language. The chapters in this volume address two major themes: first, the imperative for standardization is influenced by many social and political factors, including identity, age, ease of use of the language, and familiarity, as well as the nature of the language itself. The second theme investigated by the authors is the assumption of the value of standardization, which in many cases leads to overt or covert negotiations or conflicts in the process of language planning and orthography development. These themes are addressed through the experiences of the authors of working with languages and dialects in various parts of the world, including Cyprus, Poland, Canada, the Caribbean, and Mexico, among others. The languages examined in this volume include both those for which there have long been writing systems for "standard" dialects (such as Cypriot Greek and Podlachian, which is sometimes said to be a Belarusian-Ukrainian variety) and those for which writing has been only recently introduced (such as Cayuga, Oneida, and Mixean).
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