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WORKPACKAGE 4: Foundation of Spelling Development in European Languages Zuzana Elliott & Markta Caravolas Bangor University, Wales Slide 2 Rationale Analysis of childrens single word spelling productions of Slovak, Czech, French, Spanish, & English languages Analysis of diacritics spelling in Slovak and Czech children Editing and coding of the Weslalex corpus of Slovak and Czech printed texts +cons-cons.92.92.92.73.62 Slide 3 Project 1: Analysis of cognate word spelling productions Investigation of 1 st graders spelling performance across languages based on conventional (CA), skeleton (SK), and phonological (PH) accuracy Differences in orthographic consistency across 5 different languages Word-length (1-, 2-, and 3-syllabic words) Investigation of orthographic consistency and phonological structure based on spelling errors Omission Transposition Addition Substitution Slide 4 Project 1: Analysis of cognate word spelling productions Method All children spelled 25 cognate words to dictation Items matched for grade level, frequency range, and age of acquisition Slide 5 Project 1: Scoring examples AccuracyPhonological errors CA = Incorrect = 0 PH = Plausible = 1 SK = CVCCV = 1 CA = Incorrect = 0 PH = Implausible = 0 SK = CVCCV = 1 CA = Incorrect = 0 PH = Implausible = 0 SK = CVCV = 0 *Actual examples from English doktor (doctor) Dockder (doctor) dotere (doctor) OM = nothing missing = 0 TR = correct order = 0 AD = no additions = 0 SU = no replacements = 0 OM = missing /k/ = 1 TR = correct order = 0 AD = silent addition = 0 SU = no replacements = 0 OM = nothing missing = 0 TR = correct order = 0 AD = ck is [k] = 0 SU = voiceless [t] voiced [d] = 1 Slide 6 Project 1: Accuracy results Overall Conventional Accuracy (CA) Syllable-Specific Conventional Accuracy (CA) CZ=SK Slide 7 Project 1: Accuracy Overall Phonological Plausibility (PH) Syllable-Specific Phonological Plausibility (PH) SP=CZ; SK=FR Slide 8 Project 1: Errors OM = Omission Errors; TR = Transposition Errors AD = Addition Errors; SU = Substitution Errors CZ=SK=SP FR=CZ=SP=SKSK=CZ=SP SK=EN, FR Slide 9 Project 1: Errors Overall Substitution Errors (SU) Syllable-Specific Substitution Errors (SU) SK=EN, FR Slide 10 Project 1: Summary French & English children demonstrated relatively greater difficulty in representing phonological form and syllabic structure, especially as words got longer. The prevalence of omission and substitution and general trends favouring shorter words indicate common spelling difficulties across all languages. English childrens disproportionately high omission rates on longer words suggest slower mastery of the segmental representation of spoken words and/or their translation into print. Slide 11 Project 2: Diacritics SU Errors without Diacritic Leniency SU Errors with Diacritic Leniency(SK & CZ Only) Slide 12 Project 2: Diacritics Method Participants 153 Czech children (Bohemia, Czech Republic) 181 Slovak children (Bratislava, Slovakia) 44 Czech cognate words 40 Slovak cognate words Words matched in consistency, length, syllable structure, complexity, and the presence/absence of diacritics Slide 13 Project 2: Diacritics This study examined errors of omission and addition for two types of diacritics: acute marks and carons. Acute marks: , , , , , (in both languages: length & stress) in Czech language only Carons: indicating palatalization, e.g. d, , , , , (in both languages) and only in Czech language in Slovak language The Slovak word list included 10 words with 11 acute marks, and 12 words with 15 carons The Czech word list included 14 words with 14 acute marks, and 13 words with 16 carons Slide 14 Project 2: Diacritics The data were analysed based on the position of a diacritic mark in a word & the length of a word Acute marks: scored based on the number of syllables in a word, and in which syllable (1-, 2-, & 3) the diacritic mark appeared Caron marks: scored based on the number of syllables in a word, and in which syllable position (initial, medial, final) the diacritic mark appeared. The analysis was focused on the omission errors: there were very few addition errors Data were scored using binary system (0/1) Slide 15 Project 2: Diacritics dA Omission Rate (%)dC Omission Rate (%) Slide 16 Project 2: Summary Acute Marks (dA) Omissions: Overall higher error rates in Slovak subjects Increase in error rates as word length increases, though omissions did not necessarily occur in later syllables Caron (dC) Omissions: Less between-group overall difference near-equal performance Carons on consonants in medial positions frequently omitted The potential cause of Slovak childrens error rate: rhythmical shortening Slide 17 Project 3: WESLALEX Cross-linguistic database of words in childrens school books in the Slovak, Czech, and Polish languages The database contains morphologically and phonetically tagged words extracted from most widely used literary and instructional books for grades 1 to 6 All the files are in character encoding UTF-8 The lists include speech and lemma columns followed by morphosyntactic fields, which lists analyses for individual tokens Slide 18 Project 3: WESLALEX Acquired Slovak and Czech reading materials OCR scanning and processing Proofreading Coding of the texts Comparing coding system with the previously parsed texts Submitting data for each language Slide 19 References Caravolas, M., Bruck, M., and Genesee, F. (2003). Similarities and differences between English- and French-speaking poor spellers. In Goulandris, N, and Snowling, M. (Eds.), Dyslexia in different languages: Cross-linguistic comparisons (157-80). London: Whurr Publishers. Caravolas, M., Volin, J., & Hulme, C. (2005). Phoneme awareness is a key component of alphabetic literacy skills in consistent and inconsistent orthographies: Evidence from Czech and English children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 92(2), 107-39. Kessler, B., & Caravolas, M. (2011). Weslalex: West Slavic lexicon of child- directed printed words. Retrieved from http://spell.psychology.wustl.edu/weslalex Trieman, R., and Cassar, M. (1997). Spelling acquisition in English. In Perfetti, C., Rieben, L., and Fayol, M. (Eds.), Learning to spell: Research, theory, and practice across languages (61-80). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.