Bernard, Mbeh and Handwerker 1995--论文代写范文精选

这种多样性的学科可以确定为正字法用户最困难的语气标记。它允许实验者观察问题消失,作为有用的教学输入音调。此外,它可以揭示存在的问题通过所有级别,也许指向正字法本身的问题。下面的paper代写范文进行探讨。

The Kom tone orthography has a tone density of 40% (Jones, 1996: 20), and was founded by the language committee on the principle of minimising the amount of tone marking without introducing an unacceptable level of ambiguity (G. Schultz, pers. comm. 1996). Bernard, Mbeh, and Handwerker (1995, 1997) have conducted experiments on Kom tone orthography. Their work is an important development for three reasons. First, it was conducted on a much larger scale than any of the preceding work and it gives, for the first time, a high level of confidence that the findings of a tone orthography experiment generalise to the population as a whole. Second, their work establishes a new standard of rigour in the design and analysis of tone orthography experiments. Finally, Bernard et al. include mature readers in their sample, in contrast to the exclusive use of novice readers by Essien and Mfonyam. Participants come from a wide range of educational backgrounds and ages. 

This diversity in the pool of subjects makes it possible to determine what class of orthography user has the most difficulty with tone marking. It permits the experimenter to observe which problems disappear with more experience, serving as useful input for teaching tone. Furthermore, it can reveal problems which persist through all levels of experience, perhaps pointing to a problem with the orthography itself. We now review the larger of the two experiments (Bernard et al., 1997). The experiment used thirteen participants who were literate in English. All but one could already read Kom, nine could write Kom, and six had at some time been teachers of Kom. The materials were based on a set of fifty sentences (6–67 words long) randomly selected from a corpus consisting of proverbs and descriptive texts. Each sentence was written with and without tone marks, and the resulting hundred sentences were randomised. Participants were given a practice exercise lasting fifteen minutes on average.

As in Essien’s experiment, participants were asked to study a sentence until a sensible reading was found, and then to read it before going on to the next sentence. The perception and vocalisation times (as defined by Essien) were measured, and the reading was judged to be either correct or incorrect. Bernard et al. found that the presence of tone marks increased perception time by over 50% and vocalisation time by 15%, while having no effect on the likelihood that a sentence was pronounced correctly. They also report that sentence length had an important effect on accuracy.

Bernard et al. are right to be cautious about generalising this finding to other tone languages. They draw attention to the fact that tone languages use tone in different ways, and call for ‘a program of research to test systematically and comparatively the need for and the effects of marking tone in the languages of the world.’ The need for such a program is clear. And it should be complemented with research on different methods of marking tone for the same language, given the wide variety of tone marking methods that exist (Bird, 1998b). The experimental paradigm adopted by Bernard et al. has some weaknesses. 

Like Essien, they chose an unnatural reading task. Normal reading aloud involves simultaneous vocal and visual activity, where the gaze location is usually slightly further along in the text than the word being uttered, and where the two locations are separated by a processing window. Languages evidently do not differ significantly in this property (Gray, 1969: 43ff). Orthographic ambiguity can be resolved without silent reading ahead for contextual clues if there is sufficient disambiguating information inside and to the left of the processing window. If we increase the size of the processing window to include the whole text, by allowing subjects to read ahead silently before reading aloud, then the reader’s reliance on the tone marks is greatly reduced. It is hardly surprising that no disambiguation effect was found. 

A second weakness in the design of the experiment is the accuracy measure. Essien had no measure for accuracy; he evaluated only speed. Bernard et al. have already made an important improvement in assessing accuracy. However, they use a binary variable: a sentence with five tone errors receives the same score as a sentence with just one. This measure is too coarse to pick up differential rates of error across a set of candidate orthographies. And it is too coarse to distinguish between different kinds of tone error, such as pronunciation versus comprehension errors. 

A third issue, impressed upon me by William Bright (pers. comm. 1998), is that the many-to-one mapping of tones onto graphemes for Kom, explained at the start of this section, may be at fault. It is at least conceivable that the findings of Bernard et al. demonstrate that this mapping does not correspond adequately to the tonological structure of the language, rather than anything more general about the wisdom of tone marking. This concludes the discussion of experimental work on African tone orthography. Although each of the three experiments uses different methods, different kinds of subjects and different languages, all agree that full surface tone marking is not optimal. The high tone density which results from surface tone marking imposes too great a cognitive load on readers, and they are unable to use the information conveyed by the tone marks effectively.

An Experiment with Dschang 
Dschang is a Grassfields Bantu language known to its speakers as Yémba. It is spoken by upwards of 350,000 people in the Western Province of Cameroon. It has predominantly subject-verb-object word order and limited nominal and verbal morphology. The phonology of Dschang has been treated by Haynes (1989) and Bird (1998a).

Objectives 
The main aim of the experiment was to evaluate the existing tone orthography of Dschang. The first objective was to verify the assumption that the orthography with tone marks was an improvement on the orthography without tone marks. The second was to learn whether beginning or experienced readers were better served by the tone marks. Beginning readers, with slower reading rates and lower comprehension, might be unable to profit from context efficiently and so might rely on the disambiguating function of tone marks. Or mature readers might have learned to capitalise on the information encoded in the tone marks. Therefore the first objective would require the use of both beginner and mature readers. 

A third objective for reading was to discover words and constructions which are liable to be confused, in either the existing or the zero tone marking system. A fourth objective was to assess subjects’ active knowledge of the tone orthography by asking them to add tone marks to an unmarked text. Finally, I wanted to gauge attitudes to tone marking. Do people use tone marks in situations which are not closely monitored, such as personal correspondence? Is their level of self confidence reflected in their performance? These and other questions were devised to probe people’s perceptions and practices away from the spotlight of the formal reading and writing tests.

Subjects 
Sixteen native speakers of Dschang participated in the experiment for payment. Subjects were chosen with widely varying ages, levels of formal education and reading abilities. Some had little experience of the writing system, having completed just half of the primer, while others had extensive experience (such as one of the primer’s authors). The subjects are summarised in Table 5. The performance evaluation in the last column will be explained later.

Materials Twenty narrative texts were collected having an average length of 200 words. From these, four were selected which were of similar style, length and difficulty. (These texts are included in the Appendix.) The texts were chosen so as to not overlap significantly in lexical content. A native speaker I had trained over the preceeding two years then prepared each text in two versions for full and zero tone marking, and these were checked by an experienced literacy worker for any errors, especially tone marking errors. 

Once the corrections were made and double checked, two booklets were prepared, each having four texts, half with full marking and half with zero marking. One booklet contained Z1, Z2, F3, F4, while the other contained Z3, Z4, F1, F2. Thus both booklets contained the same texts, but the booklets differed in terms of which texts were marked for tone. The booklets had a page of instructions that were written in French since all subjects were also literate in French.2 The booklets finished with a one page written questionnaire (also in French) to assess attitudes to tone marking and to elicit a self-assessment of tone-marking ability. This questionnaire was placed at the end of the experiment since, by this time, readers would have been alerted to the problems they have with reading. The questions and responses were in French, and are translated into English here. The questions are listed in (6).

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