Alphabetism and the science of reading: from the perspective of the akshara languages (original) (raw)
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Users of the internet, in all its many languages, will be familiar with Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia. They will readily recognise its spherical logo, depicting an incomplete jigsaw puzzle of 51 pieces, each one carrying a glyph (a letter or symbol) from a different written script. The website claims that each symbol approximates the /w/-like sound or syllable at the beginning of the word Wikipedia. The diversity of the world's writing systems is presented here in graphical form for our visual appreciation. The complex challenges involved in learning any particular writing system, however, may not be fully appreciated until a speaker attempts to acquire literacy, or attempts to cross from one writing system to another.
The effects of orthographic depth on learning to read alphabetic, syllabic, and logographic scripts
Reading Research Quarterly, 2004
he problem of how to represent spoken language in writing has historically been solved in different ways (Daniels & Bright, 1996;. One distinction is whether to "write what you mean" or "write what you say." Logographic systems such as Chinese and Japanese kanji use symbols to represent meaning directly and have no or comparatively few cues to pronunciation. Other writing systems represent speech sounds. The characters of syllabic systems such as the Japanese kana correspond with spoken syllables, whereas those of alphabetic systems correspond with separate phonemes. However, alphabetic orthographies vary in the degree to which they are regular in their representation of sound. The writing systems of Serbo-Croatian, Finnish, Welsh, Spanish, Dutch, Turkish, and German are on the whole much more regular in symbol-sound correspondences than those of English and French. The former are referred to as transparent or shallow orthographies in which sound-symbol correspondences are highly consistent, while the latter are referred to as opaque or deep orthographies that are less consistent because each letter or group of letters may represent different sounds in different words.
ORTHOGRAPHY DESIGN and READING
ORTHOGRAPHY DESIGN and READING, 2022
Orthographies are for reading, of course; and of course, for writing as well, though what is written is intended for reading, at least by the author, at least as he or she writes. The written is something other than a picture or a painting, though both are initially processed visually; and the written is more than a musical score, though both have something to do with sounds 'to-be-performed'. Presumably, then, one's understanding of reading should have, and no doubt already does have, something to do with designing orthographies; and one's understanding of reading is largely a matter of understanding the cognitive processes involved in reading. We are giving ourselves a challenging task: How to "reverse engineer" the design of a new orthography based on what we know about the cognitive processing of reading texts in established orthographies? To advance this project I consider a few of the default understandings that many promote, intentionally or unintentionally, explicitly or implicitly, verifiably or otherwise. These default understandings act (almost) as axioms for some, that is, self-evident truths, that which is taken as given, as already firmly established rules or principles, which perhaps are or should be beyond questioning. I think these common and consequential understandings warrant further scrutiny, which I then pursue.
The ABC of Reading. Perspectives on the alphabetic principle
L1 Education Studies in Language and Literature, 2011
An alphabetic writing system is a system in which words consist of individual letters that correspond to spoken-language units at a similar level of analysis. The systematic relationships between units of these two systems are collectively referred to as the Alphabetic Principle. This principle has attained the status of one of the most basic and universal assumptions in current research on reading and writing. But although it is thus extensively used, there have been few attempts to determine what restrictions may apply to its appropriate use as a scientific term. A primary aim of the present article is to contribute to the empirical foundation of reading research through a clarification of the scientific status of the Alphabetic Principle. The article analyses a report from the United States National Reading Panel (NRP, 2000), chosen as an example of how the Alphabetic Principle is used in current reading research, and addresses the Alphabetic Principle qua principle in order to clarify its scientific status. We argue that the term "principle" creates the incorrect impression that the phenomenon is precisely defined and universally valid. As we see it, the Alphabetic Principle rather refers to regularities or patterns that vary between languages. Phonics, the reading-instruction approach normally defined on the basis of the Alphabetic Principle, is of greatest value for languages with shallow orthographies -but even there, we should be aware that no simple and unambiguous association exists between grapheme and phoneme.
Empirical Evidence and the Typology of Writing Systems: a Response to Handel
Scripta, 2014
A writing system capable of transcribing any utterance in its associated language necessarily combines phonographic and logographic techniques, and therefore invokes both phonological recoding and the identification of whole words or morphemes. The idea that Chinese writing is uniquely and exceptionally logographic arises from a failure to recognize the logographic features of alphabetic and other so-called "phonetic" writing systems as well as real-life instances of extreme phonography and logography. ) maintained this view in part because of contemporary studies (e.g. Horodeck 1987) showing that phonological recoding usually precedes lexical identification in the reading of Chinese characters. More recent results, based on a variety of advanced experimental methods (e.g. Dehaene 2009, Dehaene & Cohen 2011) strongly support DeFrancis's position. It is time to abandon the fiction that people learn and use writing systems based on Chinese characters in ways fundamentally different from those people use to learn and use all other writing systems. The causes of cultural differences that distinguish East Asia from other parts of the world are to be found in differences in history, education, social organization, economics, and politics, not in psycholinguistics.
The dynamics of reading in non-Roman writing systems: a Reading and Writing Special Issue
Reading and Writing, 2012
This paper provides a short overview of current issues in research on continuous reading in non-Roman orthographies. At the same time it also serves as an introduction to the present Reading and Writing Special Issue on this topic. The main questions examined in the contributions to this volume are closely related to issues that have been central to research debates on reading in English, German and French. However, we argue that these innovative approaches to the dynamics of reading in Chinese, Japanese and Korean go far beyond a simple comparative research strategy. Instead, by illuminating phenomena like word segmentation, parafoveal processing and semantic analysis from their unique perspectives, they provide valuable insights into the more general question of to what extent information processing in reading is universal as opposed to language specific. Moreover, we expect that these initial studies will trigger more basic research on non-alphabetic reading, providing a foundation for useful application.