--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@...>
wrote:

> suzmccarth wrote:
>
> > Phonological awareness divorced from visual script
>characteristics
> > is very problematic. I don't know where to start. How can I
>explain
> > that people become aware of how to discriminate, identify, label
>and
> > segment sounds in words *because* these sounds are representated
> > separately in the script. If this is not done, as it is not, in a
> > syllabic script, then these phonological skills are variable.
>Some
> > people learn them and others don't. Some people will never learn
> > them.
>
> See the articles by Aronoff AND Daniels AND Faber in the Milwaukee
> volume (Downing, Lima, and Noonan, The Linguistics of Literacy,
>1992
> [1988]) -- and the postscript by Ong,

Thanks for mentioning this literature. I was hoping you would. It
will be on my reading list for this fall. This is a very important
and much overlooked area of study.

"The strongest position on this issue is perhaps the one taken by
Faber (Faber, 1992) Faber explicitly argues that phonemic
segmentation is an epiphenomenon due to alphabetic writing, (p. 111)

'... investigations of language use suggest that many speakers do
not divide words into phonological segments unles they have received
explicit instructions in such segmentation comparable to that
involved in teaching an alphabetic writing system.

... Now there is certainly evidence that people who were taught to
read Indic scripts (and are not literate in a purely alphabetic
script such as English) are less segmentally aware than there
counterparts in places where alphabetic scripts are used."

http://compling.ai.uiuc.edu/rws/newindex/indic.pdf.

http://www.google.ca/search?
hl=en&q=richard+sproat+faber+indic&btnG=Google+Search&meta=

I have to mention that Sproat *says* he disagrees with Faber, but
only in the sense that she has taken a strong position on this issue
and he seeks a more nuanced position. This is a detail in my view.

(Mr. Daniels, can we take a raincheck on Pinyin. )

Suzanne