--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Mark E. Shoulson" <mark@...> wrote:

> suzmccarth wrote:
>
> >C.K.Leung also refers to the "internal structure of characters
> >encompassing both meaning (morpho) and sound (phonemics)". I

think

> >that this must be the origin of my much criticised use of the
> >term "morphophonemic" last summer, when I used the term with a
> >meaning other than the usual one (simply to describe units which
> >represents meaning and sound). For myself, I prefer to think of

the

> >word morphophonemic as being able to have more than one meaning,

but

> >I accept that others here don't - so no need to tell me this is
> >unacceptable.
> >
> >
> You can just call that "ambiguous" or even "polysemous" if you

want to

> sound erudite.

Thanks. I think my point at the time was that morphosyllabic and
morphophonemic are more useful than logographic and quasi-
logographic, to represent the similarity and contrast between
Chinese and English orthography.

It is very useful when discussing the tranfer of reading skills from
one script to another. Chinese students learning English have more
visual based strategies for learning English, and Spanish students
have more phonological (segmental) strategies.

Unfortunately Tamil students have neither segmental nor visual based
strategies since their system is predominantly syllabic. Just
recently I read an article about the enormous difficulties young
children have learning to read in Japanese and English at the same
time. These bilingual children have a lag of several years for
English. In the US, Spanish and English phonological skills are
shown to transfer but the morphological aspects of English are still
difficult.

This has *nothing* to do with the eventual level of academic
achievement of children from these cultures - it has to do with
transfer of skills in the initial atages of reading.

However, I suppose there must be some other terms available. Maybe

1. syllabic - Japanese(with additional morphosyllabic component),
- Tamil (with a segmental aspect)

2. morphosyllabic - Chinese

3. segmental - Spanish

4. morphosegmental - English, French

As you can see from these terms, Tamil and Japanese have no
component in common with English so have the most difficulty
tranferring reading ability.

There is no chance of sounding erudite here. But the real life
problem persists -how to classify scripts to predict difficulty of
transfer of reading skills.

Suzanne