Orthography Phonology Morphology And Meaning

The area of research on printed word recognition has been one of the most active in the field of experimental psychology for well over a decade. However, notwithstanding the energetic research effort and despite the fact that there are many points of consensus, major controversies still exist. This volume is particularly concerned with the putative relationship between language and reading. It explores the ways by which orthography, phonology, morphology and meaning are interrelated in the reading process. Included are theoretical discussions as well as reviews of experimental evidence by leading researchers in the area of experimental reading studies. The book takes as its primary issue the question of the degree to which basic processes in reading reflect the structural characteristics of language such as phonology and morphology. It discusses how those characteristics can shape a language's orthography and affect the process of reading from word recognition to comprehension. Contributed by specialists, the broad-ranging mix of articles and papers not only gives a picture of current theory and data but a view of the directions in which this research area is vigorously moving.

Collected here are eleven papers devoted to various aspects of the orthography/phonology interface. Topics include spelling-to-sound correspondence for English, French, and Russian, the design of a generative phonology for orthography data-base access, the linguistic sign and orthographic and phonological error, the analysis of Greenlandic school children’s spelling errors, the orthographic representation of phonemic nasalization and its implications for prosodic theory, the psycholinguistics of phonological recoding in reading, orthography as a variable in psycholinguistic experiments, spelling and dialect, orthography and the typology of phonological rules, and orthography and historical phonology.

Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2,3, University of Cologne (Englisches Seminar), course: Hauptseminar: Writing Systems, language: English, abstract: Phonological developments in English after the standardization of the orthography and their consequences for the relationship between phonology and orthographyThis essay first explains what sound change is and then describes differences between Middle English and New English concerning consonant and especially vowel patterns due to the Great English Vowel Shift. Then the standardization of the orthography and phonological changes after the 17th century are discussed. Finally, the results of these changes for the relationship between phonology and orthography today are depicted. Sound change is referred to modifications in the language that lead to the introduction or loss of phonological elements (Lehmann 1992: 183). Sound change means a modification of distinctive features of the phonemes (Lehmann 1992: 191). Today sound changes are mostly indicated by means of distinctive features rather than by means of rules as it was in earlier times, because an indication by means of distinctive features is more precise. Generally, a sound can change in its place or manner of articulation, in the position of the velum or in its glottal articulation (Lehmann 1992: 191-193). Furthermore, changes may take place in the characteristic features of a vowel, i.e. in the degree of vowel opening, in the degree of fronting or in the labial articulation (Lehmann 1992: 193-194). A sound change can either be conditioned or unconditioned. Within a conditioned change an allophone of a phoneme changes only in a specific environment and stays the same in all others, whereas within an unconditioned change, a phoneme changes in all possible environments, which happens very seldom (Lehmann 1992: 190-191). Simple treatments of sound changes are normally unrealistic, i.e. to assume that all phonemes /x/ have become /y/ at time z (Lehmann 1992: 190). Usually a tabloid which shows that each phoneme /x/ became /y/ and each phoneme /y/ became /z/ depicts only the most common cases. But often a change is restricted to a certain environment and does not take place in others. Changes can be interpreted as addition, as alteration or as loss of a feature. Accordingly, when changes are described by rules they are described as rule addition, rule loss or rule recording. (Lehmann 1992: 204-205). A “sound change only occurs when there is a disruption of the phonological system”. This disruption may take place by two mechanisms, either by merger or by split. [...]

"What was the language of the Quran like, and how do we know? Today, the Quran is recited in ten different reading traditions, whose linguistic details are mutually incompatible. This work uncovers the earliest linguistic layer of the Quran. It demonstrates that the text was composed in the Hijazi vernacular dialect, and that in the centuries that followed different reciters started to classicize the text to a new linguistic ideal, the ideal of the arabiyyah. This study combines data from ancient Quranic manuscripts, the medieval Arabic grammarians and ample data from the Quranic reading traditions to arrive at new insights into the linguistic history of Quranic Arabic"--

This Research Topic explores the processing of morphemes, the smallest units of language that bear meaning and that combine to form more complex words. The articles gathered under this Research Topic investigate typical and atypical morphological processing by children and adolescents in ten different languages. These articles provide cross-linguistic and cross-script evidence of the early sensitivity of children to the morphemic structure of words, irrespective of whether they are struggling readers or typically developing. All in all, the collection allows for a better understanding of how morphological processing skills develop, providing valuable clues as to how this competence can be used as a tool to improve literacy acquisition in struggling readers.

This book brings together current research findings on the involvement of word-internal structure for the purpose of word reading (especially morphological structure). The central theme of reading complex words is approached from several angles, such that the chapters span a wide variety of topics where this issue is important. It is a valuable resource for all researchers studying the mental lexicon and to those who teach advanced courses in the psychology of language.

Written by a team of global scholars, this is the first Handbook covering the rapidly growing field of historical orthography. Comprehensive yet accessible, it is essential reading for academic researchers and students in the field, and in related areas such as morphology, syntax, historical linguistics, linguistic typology and sociolinguistics.