(1560)CYPRIOT DIALECT AND SPELLING: HOW DO GREEK-CYPRIOTPRIMARY SCHOOL CHILDREN SPELL STANDARD MODERNGREEK AND CYPRIOT DIALECT WORDS?

摘要

Henderson (1984) gives the definition of orthography as ‘the visual pattern of the written language as itrelates to the graphemic, phonological and semantic features of the language’. This definitionsuggests that orthography (the writing system of a language) is not only a visual representation of aspoken language but it also involves phonemic, syntactic and semantic conventions that govern it.This is the reason why there is a general belief in the literature that accurate spelling requiresmorphophonemic knowledge. Of course, morphophonemic knowledge is not sufficient for spelling allwords of a language -especially in English and Greek- because in the case of words whose origins aresomewhat ambiguous, morphophonemic knowledge alone can not be utilized in order for the correctspelling of a word to be produced. There is a need of a whole word store (mental lexicon) from wherethe correct spelling of such a word can be retrieved. Because there is evidence of various factorsinfluencing spelling, especially in languages that are ‘deep’ (for spelling having irregular phoneme-tographemecorrespondences), investigators are trying to identify which are the different processes thatgovern spelling production and spelling development. The aim of the present study is to identify thesedifferent processes by integrating in the methodology Greek-Cypriot children’s spelling of bothStandard Modern Greek (SMG) words and Cypriot Dialect (CD) words.Because Greek has a deep orthography, it is particularly difficult for most beginning spellers to master.The task of mapping speech onto print may be even more challenging for children who mainly verballycommunicate in a dialect. To date, relatively little is known about the relations between dialect use andspelling skills among children who are learning to read and write. The importance of the study liesmainly in the fact that there are very few investigations of spelling in the CD and even fewer, if none,exploring children’s spelling patterns when asked to write in the CD. In Cyprus, Greek-Cypriotscommonly verbally communicate using the Cypriot Dialect (CD), whereas, Standard Modern Greek(SMG) is the variety used in education and in most public fora and formal settings;;it is the language ofthe press and of the media at large [1].The participants of the study were Greek-Cypriot children attending the last three grades of primaryschool (4th to 6th grade). Spelling accuracy was examined with a 60-item dictation task in traditionalspelling test format. The task included 60 words, half were dictated in SMG and half were dictated inthe CD. The data analysis was twofold;;firstly an analysis was made looking at children’s spellingswhen they spelled SMG and CD words. The second analysis was performed for the CD words,spelling of the phonemes that are characteristic of the CD was investigated. Results are discussedand conclusions are drawn.