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This chapter reviews evidence that the orthographic forms (spellings) of L2 sounds and words affect L2 phonological representation and processing. Orthographic effects are found in speech perception, speech production, phonological awareness, and the learning of words and sounds. Orthographic forms facilitate L2 speakers/listeners – for instance in lexical learning – but also have negative effects, resulting in sound additions, deletions, and substitutions. This happens because L2 speakers’ L2 orthographic knowledge differs from the actual working of the L2 writing system. Orthographic effects are established after little exposure to orthographic forms, are persistent, can be reinforced by factors other than orthography, including spoken input, and are modulated by individual-level and sound/word-level variables. Future research should address gaps in current knowledge, for instance investigating the effects of teaching interventions, and aim at producing a coherent framework.
In this chapter, we thoroughly describe the L2LP model, its five ingredients to explain speech development from first contact with a language or dialect (initial state) to proficiency comparable to a native speaker of the language or dialect (ultimate attainment), and its empirical, computational, and statistical method. We present recent studies comparing different types of bilinguals (simultaneous and sequential) and explaining their differential levels of ultimate attainment in different learning scenarios. We also show that although the model has the word “perception” in its name, it was designed to also explain phonological development in general, including lexical development, speech production, and orthographic effects. The chapter demonstrates that the L2LP model can be regarded as a comprehensive theoretical, computational, and probabilistic model or framework for explaining how we learn the phonetics and phonology of multiple languages (sequentially or simultaneously) with variable levels of language input throughout the life span.
This chapter begins by highlighting southern African archaeology’s importance at a global level, stressing the enormous time-depth over which hominins have been present in the region, the diversity of its archaeological record, and the contributions that this has made and continues to make to broader debates within archaeology and anthropology. Next, it indicates key changes made here relative to the first edition of this book in 2002 and then identifies the main sources of evidence available for reconstructing southern Africa’s past. These include archaeology, palaeoclimatic and palaeoenvironmental science, ethnographic data, historical linguistics, genetics, and oral and written histories. The chapter then introduces the overall structure of the book, ending with a discussion and justification of some key matters of nomenclature regarding how southern Africa’s varied inhabitants have been/should be called. Guidance is also given on matters of orthography relative to sounds not used in English.
Most Slavic orthographies are relatively shallow, relying on phonemic and morphological principles; other orthographic principles play minor roles. However, some orthographies with a rather unbroken tradition give the historical principle a certain role (like Polish or Czech); others rely heavily on the morphological principle (like Russian or to some extent Bulgarian). In some minor details (like comma rules or quotation marks) one can see different external influences, especially French and German. In the ways writing systems were adapted, the major split is between languages written in Cyrillic and those written in Latin. In the Latin alphabet, the main devices used are diacritics (nowadays especially those introduced by the Hussites) and digraphs, whereas Cyrillic hardly has diacritics or digraphs at all but uses special letters created from ligatures or with diacritic elements or borrowed from a different script. Spelling reforms over the course of history have generally strengthened the phonemic principle, unified orthography for a language, or increased or decreased differences vis-à-vis other languages in line with the political situation.
In this chapter, we explore how our brains help us read and understand written words. Imagine when you started school – you could talk, recognize some letters, and start to hear the sounds in words. These skills lay the groundwork for learning to read. Good language skills make it easier to learn to read. But heres the twist: our brains werent originally built for reading. Weve only been reading for a few thousand years, while weve been using spoken language for tens of thousands of years. So, our brains adapted to this new skill of reading. We also discuss a special part of the brain called the visual word form area that helps us recognize words. We explore how reading changes our brains and why its crucial to have both good language skills and a writing system around to help us become readers. Dyslexia, a reading difficulty, is also discussed. In simple terms, well uncover how our brains enable us to read by adapting to new cultural practices, like writing, and how they use our visual system to make reading possible.
The identification of Assyrian personal names in Babylonian sources poses a challenge because there is a considerable degree of overlap between the name repertoires of Babylonia and Assyria in the first millennium BCE. As a first step, this chapter identifies three relevant categories of names attested in Babylonian sources: distinctively Assyrian names, distinctively Babylonian names, and names common to both Assyria and Babylonia. The next step is to isolate names belonging to the first category: those that are distinctively Assyrian. To this end, the chapter identifies four diagnostic features which may occur separately or in combination: (i) Assyrian divine elements; (ii) Assyrian toponyms; (iii) Assyrian dialectal forms, and (iv) vocabulary particular to the Neo-Assyrian onomasticon. Orthography and phonology, including the treatment of sibilants, are further considerations. The chapter also addresses the historical background since this provides important context for investigating the presence of Assyrian name-bearers in Babylonia, both before and after the fall of Assyria in 612 BCE.
Chapter 10 describes how differences between a learner’s first language(s) and the target language(s) may influence their learning experience. Concepts like crosslinguistic transfer, grapheme-phoneme correspondence, and typography are presented through a variety of exemplars. Research-based strategies on how to teach a new writing system, introduce text-based resources featuring unfamiliar scripts, and differentiate instruction based on learners’ linguistic backgrounds are provided.
This article proposes a new acrostic (SAPI) and telestic (SOIS) at Laus Pisonis 227–30. Their position opposite one another is an indication that they are to be read as a single sentence and an admonition to both dedicatee and reader that poet and patron need each other to gain eternal fame. The telestic allows us to reconstruct the poet's usus scribendi of the reflexive possessive pronoun suus.
During the tenth century AD, Harald Bluetooth ruled Denmark from the royal seat at Jelling. The two extant Jelling mounds are traditionally associated with Harald's parents, Gorm and Thyra, about whom we know little. Unusually, the name Thyra appears on both Jelling runestones and on several others from the region. If all refer to the same person, she would be commemorated on more runestones than anyone else in Viking-Age Denmark. The authors use 3D-scanning to study rune carving techniques, combined with analyses of orthography and language, concluding that the Jelling 2 and Læborg stones are linked by the hand of the carver Ravnunge-Tue. The results suggest Thyra played a pivotal role in the emergence of the Danish state.
Samuli Paulaharju was a Finnish ethnographer who visited the Kven minority in Northern Norway – Ruija – in the 1920s and 1930s. Together with his wife Jenny he collected ethnographic material among the Kvens, and corresponded frequently with some of them. Many wrote in Finnish, and most were self-taught writers.
We focus on the orthography used by these writers who were writing in a multilingual environment. We identify two writing cultures, one associated with Old Literary Finnish and Early Modern Finnish, the other with Modern Written Finnish (MWF). The orthography used by the former is characterized by the use of b, d, g for p, t, k in native Finnish words, which we attribute to influence from Norwegian. By contrast, the orthography of the latter largely resembles the MWF of the time. However, both groups substitute t for d – a phenomenon found in Finland during the same time period – as well as occasionally use Norwegian characters.
The chapter ’Linguistic Scratching Posts’ looks at how to analyse the collected data to describe a linguistic variety. Taking a dialectological approach, it shows lexical, morphological, and orthographical variation in a list of cat-related keywords. It also uses the categories of the feline purrspective and the human perspective, which illustrate the semantic variation in cat-related digital spaces. All the categories are listed with examples from the data. To show the vastness of the number of users and posts we are dealing with, the chapter provides some statistics for the four social media platforms from which the data was collected: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube.
The English language is the world’s first – and so far, only – global language. There are various reasons for this, including that it was the language used historically in the British Empire: the most powerful and extensive empire the world has ever seen. English is also the language exported to the world by the United States of America, through its economic, military, cultural and scientific power for the past century (Singh, 2005). This has resulted in English having high utility as a lingua franca, or a ‘common’ language, which is very useful as a means of communication between people and nations who typically do not share any other language. Consequently, English is learned and/or spoken to some extent by between 1.5–2 billion people today – or around one-quarter of the world’s population (Crystal, 2009, pp.61–9).
This Element aims to address the complexity of metalinguistic awareness to achieve a thorough account of its impacts on second language (L2) reading development and promote an in-depth understanding of the factors regulating the influence of first language (L1) metalinguistic awareness on L2 reading. It is guided by four questions: 1) To what extent do L1 phonological, orthographic, and morphological awareness correlate with L2 phonological, orthographic, and morphological awareness in L2 readers? 2) To what extent do phonological, orthographic, and morphological awareness correlate with word decoding intralingually in L2 readers? 3) To what extent do L1 phonological, orthographic, and morphological awareness correlate with L2 word decoding in L2 readers? 4) To what extent do the relations in questions 1–3 vary as a function of linguistic-, learner-, measurement-, and instruction-related factors? This Element is the first to systematically investigate the roles of distinct facets of metalinguistic awareness in L2 reading.
Historical orthography – the study of how writing systems have changed over time – is a rapidly growing area of historical linguistics. This book provides the first comprehensive introduction to this exciting focus of research. Written in an engaging and accessible way, it surveys the purposes and methods of this field, and how it has developed as a discipline over time. The volume also discusses the various levels of analysis that historical orthography can carry out, as well as key historical orthographic processes, such as standardization and language change. It covers a range of non-western and western languages, including English, in order to discuss the breadth of typological issues that can arise in the documentation of writing systems. The book also establishes links between orthography and a range of other related disciplines, a quality which makes it an essential resource for advanced students of orthography and writing systems, and historical linguistics.
Chapter 7: Reading Different Languages. This chapter outlines differences in learning to read in differing L1s. Linguistic differences, or linguistic distance, between any given L1 and L2 will be a factor to consider in L2 reading development. The study of linguistic differences when reading across languages also leads to identifying universal linguistic aspects of reading development. The chapter focuses more specifically on differing orthographic systems, from alphabetic systems to morpho-syllabic systems as well as mixed systems. A major source of variation within alphabetic systems is the concept of orthographic depth between orthography and phonology. English is the most opaque orthographic language and, in that respect, is an outlier among languages of the world. Other factors in word recognition development include the informational density of a given orthography, word reading time, and morphological processing. The many differences across languages also impact L1 to L2 reading transfer. The chapter closes with a discussion of reading universals in relation to L1 to L2 reading transfer and provides a set of implications for instruction.
Growing up multilingually and in a multilingual social environment affects the acquisition of literacy. Many multilingual children learn to read and write in the language required by the institutional context. This is often a second, sometimes unfamiliar, language for them and it is the dominant language of the society they live in. However, these children might also learn, or be in contact with, other written languages used in their families and communities. The practices in all written languages vary, and family or community languages and literacies might be typologically close or distant from the language and literacy practices expected at school, which is the main institution for literacy acquisition. Unfolding the resources and needs of multilingual children’s literacy acquisition is at the center of this chapter. The contexts of literacy acquisition in multilingual societies is presented on three different levels: by defining literacy and literacies, by presenting different multilingual and multiliterate contexts, and by zooming in on one aspect of literacy, that is, spelling.
This article is an attempt to explain an observable change in present-day English in terms of quite disparate influences. Since the change is not yet complete, it is a messy conspiracy of these influences. By studying life-time changes of this sort we may gain insights into how well-understood historical changes work. The change under discussion is most noticeable in the written form, but its trigger has been the phonetic realizations of the forms to be considered. The forms are exemplified by alternations in noun phrases such as box(ed)sets, skim(med) milk, arch(ed) corbel table. The relationship between the very different structures used in speech on the one hand and writing on the other is also relevant in this case. The NPs with -ed have a structure Adjpp N, whereas the forms without it are compound nouns. Some of the Adjpp forms found in such noun phrases are actually pseudo-past participles; that is, they are not formed from a verb, but take the -ed ending, e.g. four-wheeled, gate-legged. Whether native speakers learn such forms from the spoken or written language to some extent determines how they are perceived. This is relevant because the phonetic realization of members of both sets may be the same, so the phonetic form [bɒks set] may be perceived as boxed set or box set. I also consider the stress patterns of the new compounds, the orthography as a reflection of the structural change, and the ‘Germanic’ tendency towards compounding. The resultant picture is a messy one and the change has certainly not yet been completed, but we can see a conspiracy of disparate areas of the linguistic system putting pressure on certain lexical combinations. It should also be noted that ‘English’ is not a consistent linguistic system: we have to be clear about which variety is being discussed. English ‘belongs’ to many different groups of people, including non-native speakers as a lingua franca, so it is subject to many more influences today than the parochial versions of even just a hundred years ago.
It is true that most teachers have limited knowledge of how words work in English. Linguistics hasn’t been a feature of their own schooling or their teacher education, and you can’t teach what you don’t know. The good news is that it isn’t hard to build the knowledge – in fact, it’s fun. In this chapter we look more closely at the linguistic threads that contribute to the rich tapestry of each word: etymology, orthography, phonology and morphology.
Chapter 3 outlined four key principles for teaching spelling: start with meaning; teach spelling explicitly; teach a repertoire of spelling knowledge; and integrate spelling instruction into all subject areas. This chapter introduces a 10-step process for planning and implementing a spelling program that is grounded in those four principles. Interspersed among the steps in the planning process are some of the questions teachers and parents frequently ask as they embark on the implementation process. What would your answers be? My responses are posted at the end of the chapter.