The process-disruption hypothesis: how spelling and typing skill affects written composition process and product

This study investigates the possibility that lack of fluency in spelling and/or typing disrupts writing processes in such a way as to cause damage to the substance (content and structure) of the resulting text. 101 children (mean age 11 years 10 months), writing in a relatively shallow orthography (Norwegian), composed argumentative essays using a simple text editor that provided accurate timing for each keystroke. Production fluency was assessed in terms of both within-word and word-initial interkey intervals and pause counts. We also assessed the substantive quality of completed texts. Students also performed tasks in which we recorded time to pressing keyboard keys in response to spoken letter names (a keyboard knowledge measure), response time and interkey intervals when spelling single, spoken words (spelling fluency), and interkey intervals when typing a simple sentence from memory (transcription fluency). Analysis by piecewise structural equation modelling gave clear evidence that all three of these measures predict fluency when composing full text. Students with longer mid-word interkey intervals when composing full text tended to produce texts with slightly weaker theme development. However, we found no other effects of composition fluency measures on measures of the substantive quality of the completed text. Our findings did not, therefore, provide support for the process-disruption hypothesis, at least in the context of upper-primary students writing in a shallow orthography.

One Orthography, Four Lects: The Unified Berawan Orthography

Berawan is an endangered Austronesian language family consisting of four lects, which are Batu Belah, Long Teru, Long Jegan, and Long Terawan. Their settlements are located in the Malaysian state of Sarawak. The impetus for a unified orthography came from the Berawan community, who desire to write their lects consistently and reflecting the way they speak. The unified orthography was developed starting with a phonological analysis of the Berawan lects. This was followed by several orthography workshops and discussions with individual Berawan communities, culminating in a combined orthography workshop in which a unified orthography was agreed upon. The aim of the paper is to provide the groundwork for establishing the unifed orthography of the Berawan language family. A phonological comparison of the four Berawan varieties is included for this purpose. The phonological descriptions are taken from Burkhardt (2014). Smalley’s (1959, 1965) maxim of ‘maximal representation of speech’ and Rogers’s (2005) ‘shallow orthography’ approach are employed. On this basis, issues that arise for graphemic representation of Berawan phonemes are then discussed and the decisions made by the participants of the combined workshops are described. The paper also touches on issues encountered throughout the discussion. The issues that arose are primarily related to the differences in orthographic systems between the Berawan lects and the Malay language. The paper ends with a proposed unified Berawan orthography

Word and pseudoword superiority effects: Evidence from a shallow orthography language

The word superiority effect (WSE) denotes better recognition of a letter embedded in a word rather than in a pseudoword. Along with WSE, also a pseudoword superiority effect (PSE) has been described: It is easier to recognise a letter in a legal pseudoword than in an unpronounceable nonword. At the current state of the art, both WSE and PSE have been mainly tested with English speakers. This study uses the Reicher–Wheeler paradigm with native speakers of Italian (a shallow orthography language). Different from English and French, we found WSE for reaction times (RTs) only, whereas PSE was significant for both accuracy and RTs. This finding indicates that in the Reicher–Wheeler task, readers of a shallow orthography language can effectively rely on both the lexical and the sublexical routes. As to the effect of letter position, a clear advantage for the first-letter position emerged, a finding suggesting a fine-grained processing of the letter strings with coding of letter position and indicating the role of visual acuity and crowding factors.

Are Phonological Processes Separate from the Processes Underlying Naming Speed in a Shallow Orthography?

Introducción. El presente estudio examinó la contribución de las habilidades de decodificación fonológica y de denominación automatizada rápida a la predición de la habilidad lectora en niños españoles con dislexia.Método. Treinta y ocho lectores con dislexia y déficit en el procesamiento fonológico (edad media 9 años y 11 meses) fueron evaluados en velocidad lectora, comprensión lectora, lectura de palabras y pseudopalabras, ortografía, y denominación rápida. Se efectuaron análisis de correlación y regresión para examinar las interrelaciones entre estas variables en Español, una lengua con ortografía transparente.Resultados. Como en estudios anteriores sobre la Hipótesis del Doble Déficit en ortografías transparentes, se encontró una relación significativa entre las medidas de denominación rápida, velocidad lectora y conocimiento ortográfico; y entre las habilidades de decodificación fonológicas y la precisión en la lectura de palabras. Tanto la precisión en la lectura como las medidas de denominación rápida correlacionaron con la comprensión lectora.Conclusiones. En el presente estudio, la capacidad predictora de la denominación automatizada rápida de números al conocimiento ortográfico y de la denominación automatizada rápida de letras a la velocidad lectora fue la más alta de entre todas las medidas subyacentes a la lectura utilizadas.

How young children make sense of two different writing systems: Korean written in the Hangul alphabet, and English written in the Roman alphabet

Although many young children become literate within an environment in which different writing systems exist, there is little research on what children know about different writing systems and how they understand and develop them when they are learning more than one simultaneously. This qualitative study discusses how Korean EFL (English as a Foreign Language) children understand two different writing systems, the Korean alphabet, Hangul, and the Roman alphabet, used for English, within a peer teaching setting. The findings show that they were able not only to discover key orthographic principles which characterise each writing system but also to find similarities and differences between Hangul and English from different points of view: shapes of letters (block shaped vs linear), language units (syllables vs letters) and sound–letter relationship (shallow orthography vs deep orthography). The paper suggests that young children are able to look for key concepts in different writing systems by constructing their own ideas about the principles of reading and writing from an early age as active language learners.