The aim of the present study was to investigate the grain size predominantly used by children learning to read and spell in Indonesian. Indonesian is an orthographically transparent language, and the syllable is a salient unit. Tasks assessing various levels of phonological awareness as well as letter knowledge, reading familiar words and nonwords, and spelling stem and affixed words were administered to children in Grade 1 and subsequently 1 year later in Grade 2. The results in general indicate that the phoneme is the prominent phonological unit in the early acquisition of reading and spelling in Indonesian, but the syllable also plays a significant role, particularly when reading long multisyllabic affixed words. This highlights the variable nature of grain size used by beginners, which is dependent on developmental stage, the demands of the task administered, and the characteristics of the language and its orthography.Recently, there has been much debate about the grain size of orthographyphonology correspondences that are initially used by children when learning to read and spell (e.g., Goswami, Ziegler, Dalton, & Schneider, 2003;Hulme et al., 2002;Ziegler & Goswami, 2005). Cross-linguistic research has indicated that the level of phonological awareness initially used in reading and spelling is influenced by the orthography to be learned and the phonology of the spoken language corresponding to that orthography (Goswami, 1999). A considerable amount of research has been conducted on literacy development in Indo-European languages, but much less research has been conducted on Asian languages. Indonesian provides an interesting case study as it uses the same Latin-based alphabetic script as English, but in contrast has a high degree of orthographic transparency and the syllable is a highly salient unit, as it is both multisyllabic and has clear syllable boundaries. In the current study, the phonological grain size predominantly used by children learning to read and spell in Indonesian was investigated. INDONESIAN LANGUAGE AND ITS ORTHOGRAPHYIndonesian was decreed as the national language in 1928, and the adoption of the present Latin-based alphabetic orthography dates only from 1972 (Prentice, 1987;Sneddon, 2003). Indonesian is part of the Western Malayo-Polynesian subgroup of the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian languages, which also includes languages such as Tagalog and Tongan. It is a standardized dialect of the Malay language. The spelling and grammar of Indonesian has undergone several readjustments before arriving at its present form, which is now taught and used at schools in Indonesia (Sneddon, 2003; Tim Penyusun Kamus Pusat Bahasa, 2001). Indonesian is spoken most extensively in urban areas, and less so in the rural parts of Indonesia where local or regional languages are predominantly spoken.The alphabet used in Indonesian overlaps with 25 letters of the English alphabet; "x" is only used in loan words. Furthermore, there is a correspondence between the names of letters and the...
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