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Writing morphophonology, reading lexical tone: Linguistic and experimental evidence in favour of morphographic spelling in Kabiye (Togo)
Abstract
The shorter a word, the more likely it is to be lexically ambiguous. In the toneless standard orthography of Kabiye, a language of Togo, numerous monosyllabic heterophonic homographs (tonal minimal pairs) and homophonic homographs occur in the imperative and six associated conjugations. This paper presents the complete catalogue of these verbs, and then examines them in natural contexts. It goes on to propose a morphographic spelling in which elided root-final labial consonants are written as superscript silent letters to help the reader identify the lexeme. This spelling is tested against a diacritic tonographic alternative in an oral reading experiment. The results show that those who learnt the morphographic spelling gained more in reading accuracy than those who learnt the tonographic spelling.
This book presents the results of a series of literacy experiments in ten Niger-Congo languages, representing four language families and spanning five countries. It asks the research question, "To what extent does full tone marking contribute to oral reading fluency, comprehension and writing accuracy, and does that contribution vary from language to language?". One of the main findings is that the ethno-literacy profile of the language community and the social profile of the individual are stronger predictors of reading and writing performance than are the linguistic and orthographic profiles of the language. Our data also suggest that full tone marking may be more beneficial for less educated readers and those with less experience of L1 literacy. The book will bring practical help to linguists and literacy specialists in Africa and beyond who are helping to develop orthographies for tone languages. It will also be of interest to cognitive psychologists exploring the reading process, and researchers investigating writing systems.
This book presents the results of a series of literacy experiments in ten Niger-Congo languages, representing four language families and spanning five countries. It asks the research question, "To what extent does full tone marking contribute to oral reading fluency, comprehension and writing accuracy, and does that contribution vary from language to language?". One of the main findings is that the ethno-literacy profile of the language community and the social profile of the individual are stronger predictors of reading and writing performance than are the linguistic and orthographic profiles of the language. Our data also suggest that full tone marking may be more beneficial for less educated readers and those with less experience of L1 literacy. The book will bring practical help to linguists and literacy specialists in Africa and beyond who are helping to develop orthographies for tone languages. It will also be of interest to cognitive psychologists exploring the reading process, and researchers investigating writing systems.
This book presents the results of a series of literacy experiments in ten Niger-Congo languages, representing four language families and spanning five countries. It asks the research question, "To what extent does full tone marking contribute to oral reading fluency, comprehension and writing accuracy, and does that contribution vary from language to language?". One of the main findings is that the ethno-literacy profile of the language community and the social profile of the individual are stronger predictors of reading and writing performance than are the linguistic and orthographic profiles of the language. Our data also suggest that full tone marking may be more beneficial for less educated readers and those with less experience of L1 literacy. The book will bring practical help to linguists and literacy specialists in Africa and beyond who are helping to develop orthographies for tone languages. It will also be of interest to cognitive psychologists exploring the reading process, and researchers investigating writing systems.
This book presents the results of a series of literacy experiments in ten Niger-Congo languages, representing four language families and spanning five countries. It asks the research question, "To what extent does full tone marking contribute to oral reading fluency, comprehension and writing accuracy, and does that contribution vary from language to language?". One of the main findings is that the ethno-literacy profile of the language community and the social profile of the individual are stronger predictors of reading and writing performance than are the linguistic and orthographic profiles of the language. Our data also suggest that full tone marking may be more beneficial for less educated readers and those with less experience of L1 literacy. The book will bring practical help to linguists and literacy specialists in Africa and beyond who are helping to develop orthographies for tone languages. It will also be of interest to cognitive psychologists exploring the reading process, and researchers investigating writing systems.
This article advocates for representing grammatical tone diacritically in orthographies.
of the Witwatersrand ___________________________________________________________________________ This article explores how non-tone marking in Shona orthography results in ambiguous lexical items. It further investigates how this non-tone marking may result in processing difficulties for speakers when reading in single word contexts. The focus is on how the speaker arrives at the correct reading in view of multiple readings and meanings. This preliminary study explores what non-tone marking may cost in terms of cognitive resources when reading in single word contexts. Three models are discussed to give an insight into how single Shona word processing, which is highly ambiguous without tone marking, could be made as efficient as possible. The analysis and discussion of the article is based on the Exhaustive, Integration and the Selective accounts to explore how the readers deal with the potential processing and reading difficulties when they encounter these highly ambiguous lexical items.
Primary school enrolment in low-income countries has increased in recent years. The quality of education is, however, still a cause for concern. Better measurement of early reading progress has been suggested as a means of improving education quality. Benchmarks based on the number of ‘words per minute’ (WPM) students are able to read correctly have been proposed as a basis for assessment and comparison, even where languages and orthographies differ. This paper explores the extent to which WPM benchmarks, based mainly on research with native English speakers, are appropriate for cross-language comparisons. A quantitative study of early grade reading in two European (English and Dutch) and two African languages (Sabaot and Pokomo) analysed WPM and comprehension scores of over 300 children in three countries. Results indicate that similar comprehension scores were associated with diverse WPM rates. This suggests that WPM is not a reliable comparative measure of reading development since linguistic and orthographic features can differ considerably and are likely to influence the reading acquisition process. We argue that a good understanding of the languages of literacy (L1 and/or other) and their effects on reading acquisition are essential to the quest for quality education.
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This article outlines innovative strategies, methods, and techniques for the documentation and revitalization of Zhuang language and culture through linguistic fieldwork. Zhuang, a Tai–Kadai language spoken mainly in the rural areas of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region of southwestern China, is the largest minority language in China, with about 20 million speakers. Although Zhuang is not in danger of dying out in the foreseeable future, it is indeed an endangered language, given that language shift is occurring in which more and more Zhuang children, especially those born in the cities, are picking up Putonghua, rather than Zhuang, as their most proficient language. Efforts, such as reported in this article, must be made to document and revitalize the language.
Reading depends on the speed of visual recognition and capacity of short-term memory. To understand a sentence, the mind must read it fast enough to capture it within the limits of the short-term memory. This means that children must attain a minimum speed of fairly accurate reading to understand a passage. Learning to read involves "tricking" the brain into perceiving groups of letters as coherent words. This is achieved most efficiently by pairing small units consistently with sounds rather than learning entire words. To link the letters with sounds, explicit and extensive practice is needed; the more complex the spelling of a language, the more practice is necessary. However, schools of low-income students often waste instructional time and lack reading resources, so students cannot get sufficient practice to automatize reading and may remain illiterate for years. Lack of reading fluency in the early grades creates inefficiencies that affect the entire educational system. Neurocognitive research on reading points to benchmarks and monitoring indicators. All students should attain reading speeds of 45-60 words per minute by the end of grade 2 and 120-150 words per minute for grades 6-8.
Tone languages provide some interesting challenges for the designers of new orthographies. One approach is to omit tone marks, just as stress is not marked in English (zero marking). Another approach is to do phonemic tone analysis and then make heavy use of diacritic symbols to distinguish the `tonemes' (exhaustive marking). While orthographies based on either system have been successful, this may be thanks to our ability to manage inadequate orthographies rather than to any intrinsic advantage which is afforded by one or the other approach. In many cases, practical experience with both kinds of orthography in sub-Saharan Africa has shown that people have not been able to attain the level of reading and writing fluency that we know to be possible for the orthographies of non-tonal languages. In some cases this can be attributed to a sociolinguistic setting which does not favour vernacular literacy. In other cases, the orthography itself might be to blame. If the orthography of a tone language is difficult to user or to learn, then a good part of the reason, I believe, is that the designer either has not paid enough attention to the function of tone in the language, or has not ensured that the information encoded in the orthography is accessible to the ordinary (non-linguist) user of the language. If the writing of tone is not going to continue to be a stumbling block to literacy efforts, then a fresh approach to tone orthography is required, one which assigns high priority to these two factors. This article describes the problems with orthographies that use too few or too many tone marks, and critically evaluates a wide range of creative intermediate solutions. I review the contributions made by phonology and reading theory, and provide some broad methodological principles to guide someone who is seeking to represent tone in a writing system. The tone orthographies of several languages from sub-Saharan Africa are presented throughout the article, with particular emphasis on some tone languages of Cameroon.
Exterior letter pairs (e.g., d--k in dark) play a major role in single-word recognition, but other research (D. Briihl & A. W. Inhoff, 1995) indicates no such role in reading text. This issue was examined by visually degrading letter pairs in three positions in words (initial, exterior, and interior) in text. Each degradation slowed reading rate compared with an undegraded control. However, whereas degrading initial and interior pairs slowed reading rate to a similar extent, degrading exterior pairs slowed reading rate most of all. Moreover, these effects were obtained when letter identities across pair positions varied naturally and when they were matched. The findings suggest that exterior letter pairs play a preferential role in reading, and candidates for this role are discussed.
Should an alphabetic orthography for a tone language include tone marks? Opinion and practice are divided along three lines: zero marking, phonemic marking and various reduced marking schemes. This paper examines the success of phonemic tone marking for Dschang, a Grassfields Bantu language which uses tone to distinguish lexical items and some grammatical constructions. Participants with a variety of ages and educational backgrounds, and having different levels of exposure to the orthography were tested on location in the Western Province of Cameroon. All but one had attended classes on tone marking. Participants read texts which were marked and unmarked for tone, then added tone marks to the unmarked texts. Analysis shows that tone marking degrades reading fluency and does not help to resolve tonally ambiguous words. Experienced writers attain an accuracy score of 83.5% in adding tone marks to a text, while inexperienced writers score a mere 53%, which is not much better than chance. ...
Written not only for linguists and anthropologists, this book serves as a general reference guide to language revitalization for language activists and community members who believe they should ensure the future use of their languages, despite their predicted loss. Drawing extensively on case studies, it highlights the necessary background and central issues such as literacy, policy decisions, and allocation of resources. The volume’s primary goal is to provide the essential tools for a successful language revitalization program, setting and achieving realistic goals, and anticipating and resolving common obstacles.
Some orthographies represent tone phonemically by means of diacritics; others favor zero marking. Neither solution is entirely satisfactory. The former leads to graphic overload; the latter to a profusion of homographs; both may reduce fluency. But there is a ‘third way’: to highlight the grammar rather than the tone system itself. To test this approach, we developed two experimental strategies for Kabiye: a grammar orthography and a tone orthography. Both are modifications of the standard orthography that does not mark tone. We tested these in a quantitative experiment involving literate L1 speakers that included dictation and spontaneous writing. Writers of the grammar orthography perform faster and more accurately than writers of the tone orthography, suggesting that they have an awareness of the morphological and syntactic structure of their language that may exceed their awareness of its phonology. This suggests that languages with grammatical tone might benefit from grammatical markers in the orthography. Keywords: tone; grammar; orthography; African languages; quantitative experiment
In this paper I examine the representation of tone in Alaska Athabascan practical orthographies and the implications of such representations for literacy and language revitalization. I begin with some assumptions which I take to be uncontroversial. First, as has been argued by Bernard (1997), I assume that literacy has an important role to play in language revitalization and maintenance. While literacy by itself may do little to aid language revitalization—or may even hinder these efforts—we must acknowledge that literacy is a necessary part of language maintenance in today's highly literate world. Second, I assume that orthographic design should bear in mind the goal of literacy. While an orthography could be designed explicitly to serve the needs of language learners, such a limited scope is unlikely to serve the larger needs of language maintenance. Clearly, we can design phonetic alphabets to guide pronunciation—such alphabets are found in many world language reference materials—but I will not discuss such orthographies here, as they do not particularly serve the goal of literacy development. In Alaska Athabascan orthographies tone has been represented in a variety of ways. In some orthographies tone is not marked at all. In others every surface pitch distinction is represented by a diacritic symbol. Still other orthographies mark some tones but not others. Yet in each case the establishment of tone orthographies has been divorced from considerations of literacy. Cross-linguistically this is not unusual. Writing about African tone languages Bird notes, "All too often, tone orthographies are established by fiat and defended by anecdote" (1999a). This certainly appears to be the case in Alaska, where tone orthographies are justified primarily on aesthetic or linguistic grounds, if at all. Aesthetics and linguistics are not unimportant in orthographic design; indeed, aesthetic and linguistic concerns may usefully constrain orthographic development. But the most relevant measure of an orthography is the relative success of that orthography in promoting literacy. In this sense there are no "bad" orthographies, just less effective ones. In this paper I examine current and past approaches to writing tone in Alaska Athabascan languages, looking specifically at the degree to which tone marking has contributed to the development of literacy in particular orthographies. This investigation is motivated largely by my experiences participating in literacy workshops in Alaska and from observing the teaching, writing and reading of Athabascan languages in a variety settings. For a variety of reasons to be discussed below writing tone is both difficult to learn and difficult to teach. The crucial question then is whether this difficulty is outweighed by the potential benefits of tone marking in promoting literacy. If tone marking helps students to be more literate, then an orthography which
In certain tone languages, orthography stakeholders are open to the possibility of some kind of partial representation of tone. But how can the researcher know for sure which parts of the language need to be targeted for disambiguation? This article proposes that analysis of written ambiguity can help to answer this question. It is a method involving three stages: the development of a homograph corpus, a frequency and distribution analysis of homographs in natural texts and a miscue analysis of oral reading performance. The method is applied to Kabiye (Gur, Togo), the standard orthography of which does not currently mark tone. The conditional clause is traced through each of these three stages, ending with a proposal for its modification. This method demonstrates the extent to which the Linguistics of Writing can enrich a debate that has long been dominated by utterance-based phonological analysis.
Le choix des langues enseignées à l'école est un choix éminemment politique. Des premières écoles de l'époque précoloniale à l'école togolaise d'aujourd'hui, le problème du statut et de la place des langues enseignées engendre des conflits qui débordent largement le seul cadre scolaire. (Résumé d'auteur)
Perceptual cues mediating recognition of isolated lowercase letters have been investigated in two conditions of marginal reading:from a long distance and in eccentric vision. A high incidence of confusions indicates that observers readily use available cues for arriving at letter responses. Analysis of the confusions leads to perceptual similarities and to common properties that have possibly served as perceptual cues. Dominating similarities are /h k b/, /tilfr/,/eoc/,/aszxe/,/vw/and/gq/. Properties with high cue values are:
Politique et aménagement linguistiques au Togo : bilan et perspectives. Lomé: Université de Lomé
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