Table Of ContentSCRIPTS AND LITERACY
NEUROPSYCHOLOGY AND COGNITION
VOLUME?
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SCRIPTS AND
LITERACY
Reading and Learning to Read Alphabets,
Syllabaries and Characters
Edited bv
INSUP TAYLOR
The McLulw/1 Program in Cu/tureandTechnotogv.
Universitv ofToronto
and
DAVID R. OLSON
The Ontario lnsuuuefor Studies in Education
SPRINGER SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Scripts and literacy readIng and learning to read alphabets.
svllabarles. and characters edited bV Insup Taylor and DaVid R.
Olson.
p . c m. ~ ~ (Ne u r 0 p s y c hoi 0 9 Y and cog nit Ion ; v. 7J
Pape"s presented at a conference held June 1~4. 1988. Toronto.
Canada.
Inc I udes bib II ograph I ca I reterences and Index.
ISBN 978-94-010-4506-3 ISBN 978-94-011-1162-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-011-1162-1
1. Writing. 2. literacy. 3. GraphemICS. 4. Reading (Early
Chlldhoodl 5. Reading. Psychology of. I. Taylor. lnsup.
II. Olson. DaVId R .• 1935~ III. Series, Neuropsychology and
cognltlon ; 7.
P211 . S42 1994
302.2'244~~dc20 94~20325
ISBN 978-94-010-4506-3
Printed on acid-free paper
All Rights Reserved
© 1995 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1995
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1 st edition 1995
No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE vii
1. An Introduction to Reading the World's Scripts
Insup Taylor & David R. Olson
PART I. OPTIONAL AND OPTIMAL SCRIPTS
2. Scripts and Writing Systems: A Historical Perspective 19
Albertine Gaur
3. Optimal Orthographies 31
Henry Rogers
4. Logographic and Semasiographic Writing Systems: A Critique
of Sampson's Classification 45
J. Marshall Unger & John DeFrancis
5. The Cree Syllabary and the Writing System Riddle: A
Paradigm in Crisis 59
Suzanne McCarthy
6. Developing Orthographies: The Athapaskan Languages of the
Northwest Territories, Canada 77
Keren D. Rice
7. Orthography and Reading in Kannada: A Dravidian Language 95
P. Prakash & R. Malatesha Joshi
PART II: READING PROCESSES FOR
DIFFERENT SCRIPTS
8. How English is Read: Grapheme-Phoneme Regularity and
Orthographic Structure in Word Recognition 111
Richard L. Venezky
9. Getting at the Sound and Meaning of Logographic and
Alphabetic Scripts 131
Rumjahn Hoosain
10. Script Factors that Affect Literacy: Alphabetic vs. Logographic
Languages 145
In-Mao Liu
11. Orthographic and Psycho linguistic Considerations in Develop-
ing Literacy in Chinese 163
Che Kan Leong
v
vi TABLE OF CONTENTS
12. Differential Processing of Content Words and Function Words:
Chinese Characters vs. Phonetic Scripts 185
Insup Taylor & Kwonsaeng Park
PART III: EARLY STAGE OF LEARNING TO READ
13. Teaching Japanese Toddlers to Read Kanji and Kana 199
Miho T. Steinberg
14. Asymmetries between Reading and Writing for Japanese
Children 215
Jun Yamada
15. Reading Disabilities in Japan: Implications from the Study
of Hemisphere Functioning 231
Takeshi Hattd & Takehito Hirose
16. Writing Systems and Acquisition of Reading in American,
Chinese and Japanese First-Graders 247
Shin-Ying Lee, David H. Uttal, & Chuansheng Chen
17. Brahmi Scripts, Orthographic Units and Reading Acquisition 265
Purushottam G. Patel
18. Orthographic and Cognitive Processing in Learning to Read
English and Hebrew 277
Esther Geva
PART IV: COGNITIVE AND METALINGUISTIC
IMPLICATIONS OF LEARNING TO READ
19. Script Directionality Affects Nonlinguistic Performance:
Evidence from Hindi and Urdu 295
Jyotsna Vaid
20. Cognitive Consequences of Ll and L2 Orthographies 311
Keiko Koda
21. Lexical Representation of Script Variation: Evidence from
Korean Biscriptals 327
Kwonsaeng Park & Jyotsna Vaid
22. Syllabic Literacy and Cognitive Performance among the Cree
and Ojibwe People of Northern Canada 341
John W Berry & Jo Anne Bennett
23. Orthography, Vision, and Phonemic Awareness 359
Robert J. Scholes
INDEX 375
PREFACE
Literacy is of concern to all nations, developed or under-developed, of
the world. In recognition of this fact, the year 1990 was designated by
the United Nations as the International Year of Literacy. A literate person
is one who is able to read and write so as to function adequately in society.
And reading and writing is done in a particular writing system or script.
What kind of scripts are used in the world today and how do they influence
the acquisition, use, and spread of literacy?
To address this important and timely question, a group of international
scholars were invited to participate in the conference, 'Scripts and Literacy:
East and West' in Toronto on June 1-4, 1988. This volume is an outgrowth
of that conference.
Altogether 32 speakers presented 26 papers, of which 20 have been
selected as chapters for this volume. Three additional papers were solicited
to round out the content of the volume.
The 23 chapters discuss learning and processing of a wide variety of
scripts, some familiar and some unfamiliar, such as Chinese, Japanese,
Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, Devanagari, and Cree. The chapters are organized
in four major sections: 'I. Optional and Optimal Scripts,' 'II. Reading
Processes for Different Scripts,' 'III. Early Stages of Learning to Read
Eastern and Western Scripts,' and 'IV. Cognitive and Metalinguistic
Implications of Learning to Read Various Scripts and Script Types.'
We thank the following organizations for funding the conference: the
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Connaught
Foundation, the Japan Foundation, and the Joint Council of the University
of Toronto/Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. We also thank Sylvia
Wookey and Marie McMullin for looking after the many and varied needs
of the participants at the conference, Denese Coulbeck and J. Wibier for
their assistance in the preparation of this volume.
Toronto, Canada I. T. and D. R. o.
vii
INSUP TA YLOR AND DAVID R. OLSON
1. AN INTRODUCTION TO READING
THE WORLD'S SCRIPTS
A script or writing system represents spoken language in visible form.
Scripts are diverse in their origin and history, in the linguistic units they
code or represent, in the shape and number of signs they use, and in the
rules relating signs to their spoken forms. They are conventionally classi
fied into two main types, logographic and phonetic, on the basis of the ways
they represent language. A logograph (logo = word; graph = written sign)
represents primarily the meaning of a word or morpheme and secondarily
its sound. A sign of a phonetic script represents primarily a sound unit, either
a syllable or phoneme, and through a sequence of sounds and signs, the
meaning of a word or morpheme. Not all scholars agree on this classifi
cation, as can be seen in this volume.
This volume examines many questions about the relations between scripts
and literacy, such as their effects on learning to read, on word recogni
tion, literacy levels, and the cognitive processes. In particular it examines
on the differences and similarities between logographic and phonetic scripts.
In this introduction, we concentrate on describing various scripts, leaving
the reading processes for the contributors to discuss.
SCRIPTS: OVERVIEW
Writing systems appeared in Egypt and Mesopotamia around 3500 BC, in
the Indus River valley around 2800 BC, in China around 2000 Be, and a
millennium later in Mesoamerica. These ancient scripts used pictographs,
word signs, syllable signs, determinative, as well as combinations of two
or more of these diverse signs (e.g., Coulmas, 1989; Gaur, in this volume
and 1984; Gelb, 1952; Jensen, 1970; Sampson, 1985).
Of these ancient scripts, only the Chinese script is still used, if with some
modification. Furthermore, Chinese characters still remain basically logo
graphic. Most, though not all, of other scripts examined in this volume
evolved from the Phoenician script (l6th Century BC) and are primarily
sound-based.
The diverse scripts discussed in this volume by different contributors
are listed in Table 1.
Scripts are written in various directions. In East Asia, Chinese characters,
Japanese Kana, and Korean Han'gul were traditionally written vertically,
but in modern times, have come to be written either vertically or horizon
tally. Alphabets are all written horizontally, most from left to right, but
Hebrew, Arabic, and Urdu are written right to left (Vaid in this volume).
I. Taylor and D.R. Olson (eds.), Scripts and Literacy, 1-15.
© 1995 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
2 INSUP TAYLOR AND DAVID R. OLSON
The scripts listed in Table I are briefly described below.
TABLE I
The scripts discussed in the volume
Script type Script Region of use
MEANING BASED
Logography Chinese characters China, Taiwan (Korea, Japan)
SOUND BASED
Syllabary Kana Japan
Cree, Ojibwe Canada
Syllabo-alphabet Devanagari, Kharosthi India
Alphabetic syllabary Han'gill Korea
Consonantal alphabet Arabic, Urdu Middle East, Pakistan
Hebrew Israel
Latin/Roman alphabet English, Spanish, Athapaskan UK, U.S.A., Spain, Canada
OTHER Braille
LOGOGRAPHIC CHINESE CHARACTERS
Logographic Chinese characters are used in China (the People's Republic
of China) and Taiwan (the Republic of China), as well as by overseas
Chinese in different parts of the world. They are used also in Japan and
South Korea, where they are supplemented by phonetic scripts (Taylor
and Park, in this volume).
A logograph represents primarily the meaning of a morpheme and sec
ondarily its sound. There is nothing in a simple character that codes the
sounds of a morpheme. (A compound character is described later.) Thus
the same logograph may be given different sounds in different dialects,
languages, and times, while maintaining more or less the same meaning.
Consider the character + that represents the morpheme 'ten'. Its sound is
shi in Mandarin; sap in Cantonese; sip in Korean, and to in Japanese. (An
overbar represents a lengthened vowel in Japanese.) The syllable in
Mandarin and Cantonese has a tone, not necessarily the same tone, but
not in Korean or Japanese. A character can also have multiple sounds: the
character for 'ten' has the sounds of to-, to, jii, jitt-, jutt in Japanese. The
case is analogous to the Arabic numeral 10 being read ten in English, dix
in French, and Zhen in German. Note that ten, a word in a phonetic script,
cannot be read arbitrarily as tom or net.
Since each logograph represents a morpheme, there have to be as many
logographs as there are morphemes in a language. A large dictionary may
contain as many as 50,000 characters, though a literate Chinese may use
only about 3,500 characters. The number of characters is not only large
but also un specifiable. Numerous characters have to be complex in shape
to be discriminated from each other.
INTRODUCTION 3
While the majority of characters are semantic-phonetic compounds that
contain phonetic components, the phonetic is no longer a reliable guide
to the tone syllable of a character after an extensive sound change over
hundreds of years (Leong in this volume). For example, iI ('river')
contains the phonetic gong (level tone; right component) but has the sound
Jiang (level tone). (The left, semantic component represents 'water'.) To
ease the learning of the sounds of characters, auxiliary phonetic scripts
are used in China and Taiwan (see Lee, Vttal, & Chen, in this volume).
In spite of the disadvantages of logographic characters described above,
characters have been used continuously for thousands of years by a huge
number of people, because they have some important advantages. The
Chinese language, which uses about 400 syllables or 1,300 tone syllables,
and whose morphemes are monosyllabic, is full of homophones. The
Chinese dictionary Cihai (1979), which contains 14,872 characters, lists
no fewer than 150 morphemes with the same sound yi (falling tone). Each
of these numerous morphemes has its own distinct character. Thus char
acters are useful in differentiating abundant homophones of the Chinese
language. (To minimize ambiguity, this morpheme tends to be combined
with another morpheme to form a compound word). Logographic charac
ters are also useful in unifying the vast land of China populated by people
speaking mutually unintelligible dialects, because a Chinese character,
though pronounced differently in different dialects, maintains more or less
the same shape and meaning.
PHONETIC SCRIPTS
In a phonetic script one graph represents a unit of sound, either syllable
or phoneme, of a language. The meaning of a word or morpheme is then
obtained in a sequence of sounds and signs, as t, e, n, in that sequence
expresses one meaning and in the reverse sequence n, e, t expresses another
meaning. There are basically two types of phonetic scripts: in a syllabary
one sign represents one syllable, and in an alphabet one letter represents
one phoneme. Some scripts can be described as alphabets with syllabic
features.
Syllabary: Japanese Kana
In the Japanese Kana, one sign represents one syllable, and this sign cannot
be analyzed into the consonant and vowel parts. For example, the three Kana
,t
signs fp t.::. (ka ke ta) the first and the second signs code the same
consonant k, while the first and the third signs code the same vowel a,
but one would not know such a relation from their shapes.
There are a little over 100 Kana signs (46 basic, 25 secondary, and 35
compound) to represent that many syllables of the Japanese language.
