Consonants

1993 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Treiman
Keyword(s):  
First Graders ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Standard System ◽  
Stop Consonants ◽  
Conventional System ◽  
Number Of Factors ◽  
English System ◽  
Letter Names ◽  
Omission Errors

Learning to spell involves learning about the relations between the phonemes of the spoken language and the graphemes of the printed language. In Chapter 4, I asked how children learn these relations for vowels. The results showed that a number of factors affect children’s learning, including their exposure to printed words, their knowledge of letter names, and their phonological systems. In this chapter, I turn to consonants. I ask whether these same factors affect children’s spelling of consonants. This chapter focuses on substitution errors and, to a lesser extent, correct spellings. Consonant omission errors will be considered in detail in Chapter 8. Sometimes, the first graders’ most common spellings of consonant phonemes were those spellings that are most frequent in the conventional English system. However, the children’s spellings did not always mirror those of conventional English. The children sometimes used a grapheme that never represents the phoneme in the standard system; that is, an illegal spelling. As in Chapter 4, I focus on illegal spellings that occurred at rates of 2.5% or more. I ask why the children selected that particular grapheme to represent the phoneme. In other cases, the students used a legal spelling significantly more often than expected given its frequency in the conventional system. Again, factors other than exposure to the relations between phonemes and graphemes in English words must be responsible for the error. I ask what these factors are. As in Chapter 4, I use binomial tests to compare the frequencies of correspondences in children’s spelling to the frequencies of the correspondences in the conventional spellings of the same words. In this section, the children’s spellings of various consonant phonemes are discussed. The reader may find it helpful to refer to the consonant chart of Figure 1.5 when reading this section. The stop consonants of English are /p/, /t/, /k/, /b/, /d/, and /g/. In discussing how the children spelled these consonants, I will first consider the children’s spellings without regard to the contexts in which the consonants occurred. Next, I will discuss some errors that occurred for stop consonants in particular contexts.

Vowels

1993 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Treiman
Keyword(s):  
First Graders ◽  
Qualitative Approach ◽  
Invented Spelling ◽  
Writing System ◽  
Conventional System ◽  
English Writing ◽  
Spoken English ◽  
Letter Names ◽  
Vowel Phoneme

In this chapter, I focus on vowel phonemes. Because a study that is strictly based on a distinction between legal and illegal spellings has some serious problems, this chapter employs a more descriptive and qualitative approach. I discuss how the first graders in the study spelled each vowel phoneme of English. What do the children’s spellings reveal about their knowledge of the English writing system and about their knowledge of spoken English? The analyses reported in Chapter 3 uncovered some factors that affect how children spell phonemes. For the children in this study, the most important of these factors was exposure to phoneme-grapheme correspondences in printed words: Children used frequent correspondences more often than infrequent correspondences. Another factor was letter names: Children used correspondences in which the name of the grapheme contained the phoneme more often than correspondences in which the name of the grapheme did not contain the phoneme. A third factor was formal teaching: Children were more often correct on correspondences that were taught in the classroom than on correspondences that were not directly taught. In this chapter, I ask how these and other factors influenced the children’s spelling of specific vowel phonemes. Sometimes, the children’s choices of spellings for vowel phonemes mirrored the choices embodied in the English writing system. The children used the spellings that occur most frequently in English, whether or not these spellings were explicitly taught. In other cases, the children’s choices did not mirror the conventional ones. There are two different ways in which this occurred. First, the children sometimes used a spelling that is illegal in the conventional system; that is, a grapheme that never represents the phoneme. In these cases, something other than knowledge of conventional spelling must explain the “invented” spelling. I ask what the reasons are. In discussing these illegal substitutions, I have chosen, somewhat arbitrarily, a cut-off of 2.5%. Illegal substitutions that occurred at rates of 2.5% or more out of all spellings are singled out for discussion. A second way in which children’s choices sometimes failed to mirror those of conventional English was in overuse of particular spellings.

Spelling of Words

1993 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Treiman
Keyword(s):  
First Graders ◽  
The Other ◽  
Writing System ◽  
English Writing ◽  
Simple Classification ◽  
English System ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Level Of Analysis

In studying the first graders’ spellings, it is reasonable to begin at the simplest possible level of analysis. The most basic way to look at the children's spellings is at the level of whole words. At this level, the simplest possible question is whether a word is spelled correctly or incorrectly. Once children’s spellings are classified as correct or incorrect, a number of questions arise. Are some words easier for children to spell correctly than others? If so, what kinds of words are easy to spell and what kinds of words are hard to spell? The answers to these questions should shed light on the difficulties that children face in learning the English writing system. For example, if children have more trouble on irregular words than on regular words, one could suggest that the irregularity of the English system is one source of difficulty in learning to spell. If children often misspell inflected and derived words, one could suggest that the morphological basis of the English writing system is a problem for first graders. Such issues are addressed in the first section of this chapter. Although it is easy to classify children’s spellings of whole words as correct or incorrect, this simple classification may obscure potentially important information. For example, although KARE is the wrong spelling of care, this error is a plausible rendition of the word's spoken form. The letter k is a reasonable rendering of the phoneme /k/; /k/ is spelled as k in words like kite and king. In the terms introduced in Chapter 1, KARE is a legal misspelling of care. On the other hand, CA is an illegal spelling of care. It contains no representation of the /r/. In this chapter, I take a first step beyond the correct/incorrect distinction by classifying errors on whole words as legal or illegal. I ask whether some kinds of words give rise to more legal errors than other words and why. Legal errors are not all alike. They differ from one another in a number of ways, one of which is how easy they are to decipher.

scholarly journals A-196 BVRT Copy and Memory Trial Omission Errors Are Associated With Working Memory and Auditory Comprehension Deficits

2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (6) ◽  
pp. 991-991
Author(s):  
Vickery A ◽  
Moses J ◽  
Boese A ◽  
Maciel R ◽  
Lyu J
Keyword(s):  
Verbal Fluency ◽  
Digit Span ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Auditory Comprehension ◽  
Adult Intelligence Scale ◽  
Intelligence Scale ◽  
Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale ◽  
Benton Visual Retention Test ◽  
Wechsler Adult Intelligence ◽  
Omission Errors

Abstract Objective The goal of this study is to examine the cognitive factors that account for omission errors on the Benton Visual Retention Test (BVRT) copy and memory trials using factorial indices based on raw subtest scores of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-III (WAIS-III) and the Multilingual Aphasia Examination (MAE). Method Participants were referred for assessment at the VA Palo Alto Health Care System. One hundred and forty-three participants were sampled. BVRT omission error scores for the copy and memory trials were factor analyzed with age, education level, WAIS-III Digit Span Forward (DSpF), and Letter-Number Sequencing (LNS). These variables were refactored with the spoken language components of the MAE (naming, repetition, verbal fluency, and auditory comprehension). Results BVRT copy and memory omission scores were factorially grouped with age and inversely correlated with LNS. A second factor was composed of positive loadings on DSpF, LNS, and education. The BVRT Copy-and-Memory-Omissions-Age-LNS component was inversely and specifically related to the MAE measure of auditory comprehension. The Digit Span Forward-LNS-Education variable loaded strongly on the MAE Repetition component and secondarily on the MAE Verbal Fluency and Naming components. Conclusions BVRT copy and memory trial omission errors are strongly and specifically related to failure of auditory comprehension. Errors of this type are not related to the other three components of spoken language.

Inflected and Derived Words

1993 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Treiman
Keyword(s):  
First Graders ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
The Past ◽  
Part Of Speech ◽  
Inflected Form ◽  
Derivational Morphemes

In this chapter, I discuss the first graders’ spellings of inflected and derived words. The children in this study often misspelled inflected words (Chapter 2). One type of error that has already been documented is the omission of inflectional endings like the /s/ of books (Chapter 8). This chapter considers the children’s spellings of inflected and derived words in more detail. Before beginning the discussion, some definitions and examples are in order. In English, inflections are added to the ends of words to mark such things as tense and number. For example, helped contains the verb stem help plus the past tense inflectional suffix. I refer to the past tense suffix as -D. Helped contains two morphemes or units of meaning, help and -D. The inflected word books also contains two morphemes, the stem book and the plural suffix -Z. As these examples show, the addition of an inflectional suffix does not change a word’s part of speech. Derivations differ in several ways from inflections. For one thing, English derivational morphemes may be either prefixes or suffixes. One derivational prefix is re-, which may be added to the verb read to form reread. Derivational suffixes include -ion and -ly. Unlike inflections, derivations may change a word’s part of speech. For example, the noun vacation is derived from the verb vacate by the addition of-ion; the adjective facial is derived from the noun face by the addition of -ial. The relation in meaning between a stem and a derived form is often less transparent than the relation in meaning between a stem and an inflected form. For instance, one cannot predict the full meaning of vacation from the meaning of its parts. As discussed in Chapter 1, the spellings of inflected and derived words in English often represent the words’ morphemic forms rather than their phonemic forms. For example, the past tense suffix is /t/ in words like helped, whose stem ends with a voiceless consonant, but /d/ in words like cleaned, whose stem ends with a voiced consonant. The phonemic forms of stems, too, sometimes change when inflectional or derivational morphemes are added.

Consonant Omissions

1993 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Treiman
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
Omission Error ◽  
Monosyllabic Words ◽  
Complex Words ◽  
Conventional Manner ◽  
Omission Errors ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Do So

In this chapter, I turn from vowel omission errors to consonant omission errors. Consider the child who spelled blow as BOW. This child did not include any letter for /l/. Similarly, the child who spelled tumble as TUBOL failed to represent /m/. In this chapter, I ask when children omit consonant phonemes from their spelling and why they do so. As in Chapter 7, omission errors are defined phonologically rather than orthographically. Thus, the child who spelled thin as TIN symbolized each phoneme in the word’s spoken form, although he did not spell /θ/ in the conventional manner. From a phonological point of view, this child did not make an omission error. The study of consonant omissions is particularly important in light of the claim that beginning spellers often omit the final consonants of monosyllabic words (Morris & Perney, 1984). For example, children may misspell back as B or BA. Why do they do this? Is it because /k/ is the last consonant in the word, because /k/ is the last consonant in the syllable, or for both reasons? To address these questions, it is necessary to look beyond the simple consonant-vowel-consonant monosyllables that have been analyzed in much of the previous research. An examination of more complex words can also shed light on children’s omissions of consonants in clusters, as in BOW for blow. In the present study, consonant omission errors were not as common as consonant substitution errors. Of the children’s spellings of consonants, 7.4% or 800 out of 10,831 were omission errors. In contrast, 13.3% of all consonant spellings were substitution errors. Although the percentage of consonant omission errors was relatively low overall, omissions were quite common for certain consonants. For example, omissions were relatively common for the /l/ of blow and the /m/ of tumble; they were rare for the /l/ of love and the /m/ of milk. When interpreting the omission rates reported in this chapter, remember that the percentages are out of all the children’s spellings—correctly spelled words as well as incorrectly spelled words.

Theories of causation

1993 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Selikowitz
Keyword(s):  
Learning Difficulties ◽  
Fundamental Aspect ◽  
Close Relative ◽  
Learning Difficulty ◽  
Number Of Factors ◽  
Natural Tendency ◽  
One Step ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Specific Learning

In the definition of specific learning difficulties in the first chapter I emphasized that the delay in learning must be ‘unexplained’. It is, therefore, explicit in the definition that the cause of specific learning difficulties is presently unknown. There are few things more frustrating for a doctor to say, or for a parent to hear, than that the cause of a child’s condition is unknown. There is a natural tendency in such situations to alleviate this discomfort by guessing the cause. This is not necessarily bad, as it is by developing theories and devising experiments to test them that our knowledge advances. But the danger is that in our desire to know the cause with certainty, we may come to believe in a theory so strongly that we think of it as a fact. Theories about specific learning difficulties abound. Most are based on the assumption that there is some impairment of brain function. These theories are not mutually exclusive, since each may explain one step in the chain of events that gives rise to specific learning difficulties, as shown in Figure 3.1. Let us look at these theories one by one. These theories attempt to explain the most fundamental aspect of the condition: its primary cause. It is unlikely that a single factor can be responsible for a specific learning difficulty. Rather, it seems that a number of factors must act together. Such causation is known as ‘multifactorial’. There have been two groups of factors that have been suggested in the causation of specific learning difficulties: genetic factors and environmental factors. There is strong evidence for a genetic factor playing a role in the causation of specific learning difficulties. A number of studies have shown that children with specific learning difficulties are more likely to have a close relative with the same specific learning difficulty. No consistent pattern of inheritance has been described: sometimes it seems to be inherited from the mother, at other times from the father. For all types of such learning difficulty, boys outnumber girls by about three to one.

Competing activation in bilingual language processing: Within- and between-language competition

2003 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 97-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
VIORICA MARIAN ◽  
MICHAEL SPIVEY
Keyword(s):  
Language Processing ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Target Object ◽  
Competition Effect ◽  
Language Background ◽  
Second Languages ◽  
Spoken Language Processing ◽  
Number Of Factors ◽  
Language Competition ◽  
Parallel Activation

Two eye-tracking experiments examined spoken language processing in Russian-English bilinguals. The proportion of looks to objects whose names were phonologically similar to the name of a target object in either the same language (within-language competition), the other language (between-language competition), or both languages at the same time (simultaneous competition) was compared to the proportion of looks in a control condition in which no objects overlapped phonologically with the target. Results support previous findings of parallel activation of lexical items within and between languages, but suggest that the magnitude of the between-language competition effect may vary across first and second languages and may be mediated by a number of factors such as stimuli, language background, and language mode.

scholarly journals The use of English terms in Spanish newspapers

2015 ◽  
Vol 213 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Enas Sadiq Hamudi
Keyword(s):  
Spoken Language ◽  
Spanish Language ◽  
Scientific Language ◽  
The World ◽  
German Research ◽  
Arabic And English ◽  
The Right

The Spanish language is the fourth most spoken language in the world (after Arabic and English and Chinese).  Many words of Arabic were entered in it, where 10% of the Spanish words return to Arabic origin, as well as a large number of English, French and German   . Research divider of three chapters: Chapter I: Introduction, which is the objective of the research and the choice of subject for the purpose of study, criticism and analysis. Chapter II: It is a part of which is known as Ray Anglicism number of writers. Chapter III: Featuring practical part in the research, which we extracted the words of the original English, which are alien to the Spanish language and we analyze them according to Ray Spanish scientists and offer what the right word to be used instead of the term in addition analysis use the right or wrong of this term by Ray complex scientific language Spanish RAE. And references that have

scholarly journals Chapter Phonological Coding in Visual Language Processing - Brysbaert in Snowling et al (2022)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Brysbaert
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Word Recognition ◽  
Visual Word Recognition ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Visual Language ◽  
Reading Problems ◽  
Phonological Coding ◽  
Text Reading

In this chapter I summarize the evidence that phonology is involved in visual word recognition and text reading. This is even the case in groups with suboptimal access to spoken language (such as people born deaf and students learning a second language in school). The phonological code helps to make reading fluent, as suggested by the finding that reading problems (dyslexia) are often associated with deficits in phonology. This should come as no surprise, given that silent reading is a recent skill, which mankind added to its spoken communication developed over 2 million years.

Letter names: Effect on letter saying, spelling, and word recognition in Hebrew

2002 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 269-300 ◽  
Author(s):  
IRIS LEVIN ◽  
SIGAL PATEL ◽  
TAMAR MARGALIT ◽  
NOA BARAD
Keyword(s):  
First Graders ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
Written Language ◽  
Initial Letter ◽  
Impaired Performance ◽  
Hebrew Letter ◽  
Educational Implications ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Letter Names ◽  
Written Word

Letter names bridge the gap between oral and written language among English speaking children. This study examined whether letter names have a similar function in Hebrew. Despite their common historical source, Hebrew letter names differ from English: they are longer and not as regular phonologically. However, they follow the acrophonic principle, unlike many English letter names. Israeli kindergartners, whose mother tongue was Hebrew, were asked to orally provide initial or final letters of spoken words, to spell words in writing, and to select one written word out of two as standing for an oral word. First graders were tested on orally providing the initial letter and spelling. Children were found to rely on letter names in performing all these tasks. They succeeded more in providing the initial letter or in spelling it if the word started with a letter-name sequence, like kaftor (button), which is spelled with k (Kaf). They succeeded more in selecting the correct word between two if the words started with a letter-name sequence. In grade 1 the effects decreased and became limited particularly to phonemes spelled with homophonic letters. Partial letter names (impossible in English) affected performance but to a lesser extent than entire names. Reliance on letter names both facilitated and impaired performance but in different ways than in English. The educational implications are discussed.

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