Morphological awareness and spelling development

The aim of this thesis is to analyse the relation between morphological awareness and morphologically based spellings, in Portuguese (European Variant). Two situations where the spelling is determined by morphology are examined: when the spelling flouts letter-sound correspondence rules (consistency in the spelling of stems in base and in derived forms), and when there is more than one spelling for the same sound (discrimination in the spelling of homophone suffixes). The studies used cross-sectional (studies 1, 2 and 6) and longitudinal (studies 3, 4 and 5) designs. Study 1 examines when children from grades 1 to 4 (6- to 9-year-olds; N = 805) can take advantage of morphological information that is made available to them, implicitly, through morphological priming. The primes are base forms that share the same stem with the targets and contain well articulated, stressed vowels. The target words and pseudo-words are derived forms that contain non-stressed schwa vowels. Although differently pronounced the latter vowels are spelled consistently with those in the stems of the base forms. Primes were either oral or oral plus written. Priming effects were assessed by comparison with a non-primed condition. No priming effects were detected in 6- and 7-year-old children. Both priming conditions produced a significantly higher level of correct spelling in children 8 and 9 years of age. Oral plus written primes allowed older children to use morphological spellings in both words and pseudo-words. These results suggest that older children can use implicit morphological information to spell schwa vowels morphologically. Study 2 examined the concurrent relations between morphological awareness and morphologically based spellings. Two issues were considered: consistency in the spelling of stems in base and derived (or pseudo-derived) forms and discrimination in the spelling of words and pseudo-words ending in homophone suffixes. Children from grades 1 to 3 (6 to 8-year-olds; N = 184) participated in the study. It was found that there was a significant relation between morphological awareness and consistency in the spelling of stems in Base - Pseudo-derived stimuli, after controlling for differences in grade and IQ. Mixed results were found for the spelling of homophone suffixes. The only significant prediction obtained was between morphological awareness and discrimination in the spelling of the words ending in the homophone suffixes '-esa'/ '-eza'. In Study 3, the relation between morphological awareness and consistency in the spelling of stems is analysed, longitudinally. Children from grades 1 to 4 (6- to 9-year-olds; N = 184) were assessed in three sessions (A, B and C) each separated by six months. The results showed that some of the measures of morphological awareness could predict consistency in the spelling of stems over periods of six and of twelve months, after controlling for shared variance with Grade and IQ. This is indicative of a strong link between morphological awareness and consistency in the spelling of stems. In study 4, the relation between morphological awareness and discrimination in the spelling of words and pseudo-words ending in the homophone suffixes '-esa'/ '-eza' is analysed. The suffix '-esa' forms nouns that indicate origin or provenance. The homophone '-eza' forms abstract nouns. The participants and design were the same as in the previous study. It was found that the younger children tended to use one spelling for the two suffixes. Then, when alternative spellings were used, their assignment was unsystematic. Systematic assignment was rare even in the older children. Some measures of morphological awareness in session B, accounted for unique variance in the discrimination scores measured in session C, after controlling for differences explained by grade and IQ. In study 5, the relation between morphological awareness and discrimination in the spelling of words and pseudo-words ending in the homophone suffixes '-ice'/ '-isse' is analysed. The suffix '-ice' forms abstract nouns. The homophone '-isse' is used in the subjunctive of some verbs. The participants and design were the same as before. Correct assignment of suffixes followed the same pattern of spelling phases as described in the previous study. Significant predictions were found between sessions A and B, B and C and A and C. Some of the morphological awareness measures strongly predicted discrimination scores, after controlling for the effects of grade and IQ. Study 6 examines the spelling of older children (Grades 5, 7 and 9) and adults (student-teachers and in-service-teachers (N total = 107). The aim was to find out when consistency in the spelling of stems and discrimination of homophone suffixes were eventually achieved and whether the adult participants were aware of the morphological rules that make discrimination predictable. Consistency in the spelling of stems was only systematic in grade nine. Discrimination of the homophone suffixes '-esa'/ '-eza' was not completely systematic after sixteen years of instruction (student teachers) Discrimination of words ending in the homophone suffixes '-ice'/ '-isse' was systematic by student teachers. Discrimination in the spelling of pseudo-words was not achieved. Spelling justifications were asked from teachers. These revealed that the knowledge of morphological rules was scarce, in complete or absent. This thesis provides first evidence that older children can use morphological information that is provided, implicitly, through priming. It also shows that achieving consistency in the spelling of morphologically related stems is a long process. Systematic discrimination of homophone suffixes is even harder. However, morphological awareness was generally found to contribute strongly to the spelling, and to predict spelling outcomes, even after stringent controls for grade and IQ. Further research is necessary to examine how children develop morphologically based spellings that cannot be anchored first, in a stable phonological matrix. These results also suggest that instruction with a strong morphological rationale might significantly enhance spelling development

DIACRITIC-AWARE YORÙBÁ SPELL CHECKER

Spell checking and correction is still in infancy for Yorùbá language, and existing tools cannot be applied directly to address the problem because Yorùbá language requires extensive use of diacritics for marking phonemes and tone. We addressed this problem by collecting data from on-line sources and from optical character recognition of hard copy of books. The features relevant to spell checking and correction in this language that marks tones (and underdot) were identified through the review of existing spell checking solutions, analysis of the data collected and consultation with relevant Yorùbá Linguistics textbooks. A conceptual model was formulated as a parallel combination of a unigram language model and a language diacritic model to form a dictionary sub-model that is used by Error Detection and Candidate Generation modules. The candidate generation module was implemented as an inverse Levensthein edit-distance algorithm. The system was evaluated using Detection Accuracy (calculated from Precision and Recall) and Suggestion Accuracy (SA) as metrics.Our experimental setups compared the performance of the component subsystems when used alone with the their combination into a unified model. The detection accuracies for each of the models were 93.23%, 94.10% and 95.01% respectively while their suggestion accuracies were 26.94%, 72.10% and 65.89% respectively. In relation to the size of training corpus, the unified model was able to achieve a increase of 1.83% in detection accuracy and 5.27% in suggestion accuracy for 70% increase in size of corpus. The results indicated that each of the sub-models in the dictionary played different roles while the increase in training data does not give a linear proportional increase in performance of the spell checker. The study also showed that spell checking a Yorùbá text was better when attention is paid to the diacritical aspect of the languag

Dealing with spelling variation in Early Modern English texts

Early English Books Online contains facsimiles of virtually every English work printed between 1473 and 1700; some 125,000 publications. In September 2009, the Text Creation Partnership released the second instalment of transcriptions of the EEBO collection, bringing the total number of transcribed works to 25,000. It has been estimated that this transcribed portion contains 1 billion words of running text. With such large datasets and the increasing variety of historical corpora available from the Early Modern English period, the opportunities for historial corpus linguistic research have never been greater. However, it has been observed in prior research, and quantified on a large-scale for the first time in this thesis, that texts from this period contain significant amounts of spelling variation until the eventual standardisation of orthography in the 18th century. The problems caused by this historical spelling variation are the focus of this thesis. It will be shown that the high levels of spelling variation found have a significant impact on the accuracy of two widely used automatic corpus linguistic methods - Part-of-Speech annotation and key word analysis. The development of historical spelling normalisation methods which can alleviate these issues will then be presented. Methods will be based on techniques used in modern spellchecking, with various analyses of Early Modern English spelling variation dictating how the techniques are applied. With the methods combined into a single procedure, automatic normalisation can be performed on an entire corpus of any size. Evaluation of the normalisation performance shows that after training, 62% of required normalisations are made, with a precision rate of 95%

Towards the understanding of the alphabetic principle : conceptual changes as children learn to identify and spell novel words

Although a unifying view of literacy development is already implicit within\ud several studies, much of the knowledge is still fragmented. Hence, practitioners lack a\ud comprehensive theoretical framework within which to articulate their practice. This\ud thesis contributes to this framework by investigating whether children's conceptions of\ud the alphabetic system:\ud 1) determine the quality of their orthographic representations and their ability\ud to make inferences about graph-phonetic segments,\ud 2) are affected by adults' explanations of how scripts represent speech and by\ud the characteristics of the particular orthography that children are trying to\ud learn.\ud Sixty two monolingual Brazilian children (mean age 6 years) and 28 bilingual\ud Portuguese children attending two schools in London (mean age 6:7 years),\ud participated in this study, which involved a brief intervention (20 daily sessions).\ud The findings suggested that children's full understanding of the alphabetic\ud principle is not affected by orthographic transparency and that it is the result of a\ud process involving two levels of conceptual change:\ud 1) The characteristics of written words are not related to their meaning -\ud letters represent sub-lexical phonological units. This allows children to\ud detect phonological identity of the initial syllable and to produce syllabic\ud spellings by collating letters that represent syllables. Explicit information\ud about letter-sound correspondences is not essential for this understanding.\ud 2) Adding up the sounds of letters does not produce a word - letters within\ud words or syllables do not sound the same as in isolation. This discovery\ud triggers the use of partial phonological recoding, the production of syllabicalphabetic\ud spellings, the use of analogies and the detection of phonological\ud identity based on articulatory cues. Explicit information about the role of\ud the letters within words may facilitate this understanding and enables the\ud children to work out the grapheme-phoneme correspondence, which is the\ud last step towards grasping the alphabetic principle

How to improve learning from video, using an eye tracker

The initial trigger of this research about learning from video was the availability of log files from users of video material. Video modality is seen as attractive as it is associated with the relaxed mood of watching TV. The experiments in this research have the goal to gain more insight in viewing patterns of students when viewing video. Students received an awareness instruction about the use of possible alternative viewing behaviors to see whether this would enhance their learning effects. We found that: - the learning effects of students with a narrow viewing repertoire were less than the learning effects of students with a broad viewing repertoire or strategic viewers. - students with some basic knowledge of the topics covered in the videos benefited most from the use of possible alternative viewing behaviors and students with low prior knowledge benefited the least. - the knowledge gain of students with low prior knowledge disappeared after a few weeks; knowledge construction seems worse when doing two things at the same time. - media players could offer more options to help students with their search for the content they want to view again. - there was no correlation between pervasive personality traits and viewing behavior of students. The right use of video in higher education will lead to students and teachers that are more aware of their learning and teaching behavior, to better videos, to enhanced media players, and, finally, to higher learning effects that let users improve their learning from video

Handbook of Easy Languages in Europe

The Handbook of Easy Languages in Europe describes what Easy Language is and how it is used in European countries. It demonstrates the great diversity of actors, instruments and outcomes related to Easy Language throughout Europe. All people, despite their limitations, have an equal right to information, inclusion, and social participation. This results in requirements for understandable language. The notion of Easy Language refers to modified forms of standard languages that aim to facilitate reading and language comprehension. This handbook describes the historical background, the principles and the practices of Easy Language in 21 European countries. Its topics include terminological definitions, legal status, stakeholders, target groups, guidelines, practical outcomes, education, research, and a reflection on future perspectives related to Easy Language in each country. Written in an academic yet interesting and understandable style, this Handbook of Easy Languages in Europe aims to find a wide audience