Visual-orthographic complexity of Akshara and eye movements in reading: A study in Kannada alphasyllabary

Padakannaya, Prakash; Pandey, Aparna; Saligram, Deepthi; Rao, Shruthi Ranga

doi:10.1080/17586801.2015.1071235

Cited by 8 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 17 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Unlike English but like Turkish, the occurrence of adverbs is more in Kannada than adjectives while there are more conjunctions in English and Turkish compared to Kannada (Aydin, 2019 ; Dawson et al, 2021 ). The corpus data extends insights from behavioral data about akshara learning (Nag, 2007 ; Padakannaya et al, 2015 ; Tiwari et al, 2021 ) – some akshara types are rare and later appearing and the trends across book levels map well with the converging finding that learning of the akshara system continues well past middle school (the age band of the older books in the corpora we studied).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 68%

NSP-SCD: A corpus construction protocol for child-directed print in understudied languages

Nag,

John,

Agrawal

2024

Behav Res

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Child-directed print corpora enable systematic psycholinguistic investigations, but this research infrastructure is not available in many understudied languages. Moreover, researchers of understudied languages are dependent on manual tagging because precise automatized parsers are not yet available. One plausible way forward is to limit the intensive work to a small-sized corpus. However, with little systematic enquiry about approaches to corpus construction, it is unclear how robust a small corpus can be made. The current study examines the potential of a non-sequential sampling protocol for small corpus development (NSP-SCD) through a cross-corpora and within-corpus analysis. A corpus comprising 17,584 words was developed by applying the protocol to a larger corpus of 150,595 words from children’s books for 3-to-10-year-olds. While the larger corpus will by definition have more instances of unique words and unique orthographic units, still, the selectively sampled small corpus approximated the larger corpus for lexical and orthographic diversity and was equivalent for orthographic representation and word length. Psycholinguistic complexity increased by book level and varied by parts of speech. Finally, in a robustness check of lexical diversity, the non-sequentially sampled small corpus was more efficient compared to a same-sized corpus constructed by simply using all sentences from a few books (402 books vs. seven books). If a small corpus must be used then non-sequential sampling from books stratified by book level makes the corpus statistics better approximate what is found in larger corpora. Overall, the protocol shows promise as a tool to advance the science of child language acquisition in understudied languages.

show abstract

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 68%

NSP-SCD: A corpus construction protocol for child-directed print in understudied languages

Nag,

John,

Agrawal

2024

Behav Res

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…When asked to read sentences with three conditions of aksharas: aksharas with an inherent vowel (e.g., ಕ /ka/), aksharas with a vowel diacritic (e.g., ಕ ಿ /ki/), and aksharas with consonant ligature and vowel diacritic (e.g., ಕ ೆ ೢ /kle/), younger readers found it more challenging to read aksharas with consonant ligaturing and vowel diacritic (e.g., ಕ ೆ ೢ /kle/), with longer first pass reading time and more reading errors, suggesting that sentence reading took longer time and induced more mistakes. Similar patterns were also found among those with reading difficulties, who also displayed more fixation counts, indicating increased difficulty in processing sentences with complex aksharas (Padakannaya et al, 2016).…”

Section: Akshara Knowledgesupporting

confidence: 68%

“…In addition, many also learn to read and write in two written languages. For example, the participants of the included studies in the current review mostly speak more than one language and read more than one script (Joy et al., 2023; Nag et al., 2014; Padakannaya et al., 2016; Patel et al., 2022; Reddy & Koda, 2013; Vasudevan et al., 2023; Wijaythilake et al., 2018, 2019). The sociolinguistic contexts of bilingualism or multilingualism, as well as biscriptality in countries like India, Sri Lanka, Ethiopia, and Eritrea, are different from the sociolinguistic contexts in western societies, mostly with monolingual and monoscriptal Anglophone learners (Vaid, 2022).…”

Section: General Discussion and Future Directionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Bigger Picture of Early Literacy and Biliteracy Acquisition in Abugidas: Perspectives from Asian and African Languages

Lai,

Quinonez‐Beltran,

Joshi

2024

Reading Research Quarterly

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

With the overwhelming “Anglocentric” or “alphabetocentric” science of reading, the current review aimed to add to the science of reading acquisition from the perspective of abugidic writing system, distinct from the well‐research alphabetic writing system in multiple dimensions of orthographic complexity, as proposed by Daniels and Share (2018), such as linguistic distance, spatial arrangement and non‐linearity, and omission of phonological elements. Abugidic writing system is featured with scripts where each base consonant symbol denotes a consonant with an inherent vowel (/a/) and has billions of users in south Asia (e.g., India, Nepal, Sri Lanka), southeast Asia (e.g., Thailand, Laos, Cambodia), east Asia (parts of China) and Africa (Ethiopia and Eritrea). The current review describes the orthographic feature of Indic (Brahmi‐derived) and Ethiopic (Ge‘ez) scripts within the abugidic writing system and synthesizes existing findings on the literacy acquisition patterns specific to each script. Further, we elaborate on the multilingual and biscriptal language and literacy environment featured with the abugida‐writing societies and discuss the theoretical implication for considering multilingualism and biscriptality as an inseparable sociolinguistic factor when understanding the literacy acquisition of the abugidic writing system in particular and literacy in general.

show abstract

“…There are relatively fewer studies examining eye movements in Indic writing systems. One (Padakannaya, Pandey, Saligram, & Rao, ) tracked eye movements in Kannada, a South Indian Dravidian language, and showed that typically developing 14‐year‐old students did not show any significant differences in reading, fixation counts, and first‐pass reading time (FPRT) among three different types of words—basic akshara, consonants with vowel ligatures (CV, CVV), and conjunct consonants (CCV, CVCCV). However, students with reading disabilities (RD) and younger reading‐level matched students (RL) found it difficult to read conjunct consonants and also had longer FPRTs.…”

Section: Research On Reading Acquisition In Indiamentioning

confidence: 99%

Reading Research and Practice: Indian Perspective

Joshi

Nakamura

Singh

2017

New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Visual-orthographic complexity of Akshara and eye movements in reading: A study in Kannada alphasyllabary

Cited by 8 publications

References 17 publications

NSP-SCD: A corpus construction protocol for child-directed print in understudied languages

NSP-SCD: A corpus construction protocol for child-directed print in understudied languages

A Bigger Picture of Early Literacy and Biliteracy Acquisition in Abugidas: Perspectives from Asian and African Languages

Reading Research and Practice: Indian Perspective

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About