WORKPACKAGE 4: Foundation of Spelling Development in European Languages Zuzana Elliott & Markéta Caravolas Bangor University, Wales

Rationale  Analysis of children’s 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

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

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

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

Project 1: Accuracy results Overall Conventional Accuracy (CA) Syllable-Specific Conventional Accuracy (CA) CZ=SK

Project 1: Accuracy Overall Phonological Plausibility (PH) Syllable-Specific Phonological Plausibility (PH) SP=CZ; SK=FR

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

Project 1: Errors Overall Substitution Errors (SU) Syllable-Specific Substitution Errors (SU) SK=EN, FR

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 children’s disproportionately high omission rates on longer words suggest slower mastery of the segmental representation of spoken words and/or their translation into print.

Project 2: Diacritics SU Errors without Diacritic Leniency SU Errors with Diacritic Leniency(SK & CZ Only)

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

Project 2: Diacritics  This study examined errors of omission and addition for two types of diacritics: acute marks and carons.  Acute marks: á, é, í, ý, ó, ú (in both languages: length & stress)  ů in Czech language only  Carons: indicating palatalization, e.g. dž, ž, š, ť, ň, č (in both languages)  ě and ř only in Czech language  ľ 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

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)

Project 2: Diacritics dA Omission Rate (%)dC Omission Rate (%)

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 children’s error rate: rhythmical shortening

Project 3: WESLALEX  Cross-linguistic database of words in children’s 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

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

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),  Kessler, B., & Caravolas, M. (2011). Weslalex: West Slavic lexicon of child- directed printed words. Retrieved from  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.