网范文：“When Marking Tone Reduces Fluency: An Orthography Experiment in Cameroon” 一个声调语言的字母拼字法包括语调标志，这篇语言范文考察了语音语调，使用语气区分词法和一些语法结构。了解参与者的年龄和教育背景,在喀麦隆的西部省份正字法测试中有一定的渗透。除了一个参加过课程的语气标记。参与者阅读文本标记和未标记的语气,然后语气标记添加到标记文本。略论表明,语气标记降解阅读流畅,不帮助解决模棱两可的单词。
有经验的作家获得一定的的准确性分数增加语气标记文本,而缺乏经验的作家得分仅为53%。实验的适用性提出了严重质疑，英语论文网站，英语毕业论文，对音位的标记语言语调的措施。下面的范文进行详述。
Abstract
Should an alphabetic orthography for a tone language include tone marks? Opinion and practice are divided along three lines: zero marking, phonemic marking and various reduced marking schemes. This examines the success of phonemic tone marking for Dschang, a Grassfields Bantu language which uses tone to distinguish lexical items and some grammatical constructions. Participants with a variety of ages and educational backgrounds, and having different levels of exposure to the orthography were tested on location in the Western Province of Cameroon. All but one had attended classes on tone marking. Participants read texts which were marked and unmarked for tone, then added tone marks to the unmarked texts. Analysis shows that tone marking degrades reading fluency and does not help to resolve tonally ambiguous words. Experienced writers attain an accuracy score of 83.5% in adding tone marks to a text, while inexperienced writers score a mere 53%, which is not much better than chance. The experiment raises serious doubts about the suitability of the phonemic method of marking tone for languages having widespread tone sandhi effects, and lends support to the notion that a writing system should have ‘fixed word images’. A critical review of other experimental work on African tone orthography lays the groundwork for the experiment, and contributes to the establishment of a uniform experimental paradigm.
Introduction
In a tone language, the pitch on an individual syllable can be contrastive, thereby distinguishing two or more lexical items or grammatical categories (such as verb tense). African tone languages are often written using the IPA-based Africa Script (International African Institute, 1930), which provides diacritic symbols such as acute accent for high tone and grave accent for low tone. A set of principles whereby tonal distinctions are represented (or under-represented) orthographically is known as a tone orthography. Although some tone languages are not written with tone marks, it will often be convenient to think of them as still having a tone orthography, but with complete under-representation: ‘zero tone marking’.
All too often, tone orthographies are established by fiat and defended by anecdote. Whether or not tone is marked, the most frequently cited justifications offered by the designers are either linguistic analysis, or socio-political factors, or an impressionistic evaluation that ‘we tried it and it seemed to work fine’. This article presents objective evidence that an existing tone orthography for an African tone language actually hinders fluent reading and writing. A wide range of subjects were tested, covering different ages, educational backgrounds, and levels of exposure to the orthography. Their poor performance on reading and writing tasks involving tone marking challenged expectations and led to the conclusion that phonemic tone marking is not ideally suited to languages with complex tone sandhi. This does not mean that tone marking should be abandoned in the language.
The finding simply highlights the fact that relatively little is known about the reading process for alphabetic orthographies decorated with tone diacritics. I argue that any consideration of the linguistic and socio-political factors influencing orthography design must be complemented with experimental work that provides an objective evaluation of orthography options. Most of the existing work on experimenting with orthography is for languages with established orthographies, with the aim of discovering more about the reading process (Henderson, 1984; Frost and Katz, 1992). In the present context, however, the intention is to discover what kind of tone marking for a given language best supports efficient reading, writing and comprehension. In the following sections I shall assume that the aim of the experimental work will be to compare two or more orthography options, where each option is evaluated for its support of fluency. Other dimensions of evaluation, such as the linguistic and socio-political factors mentioned earlier, are not treated here. Nor is the issue of teachability, which depends on the pedagogical resources and opportunities in the language area. This is structured as follows. After a a brief descriptive introduction to African tone systems, I survey the experimental work on African tone orthography. Next, the experiment is presented. The ends with a discussion of some future prospects and a conclusion. An appendix contains the materials and data.
African Tone Systems
Almost 2017 languages are spoken in sub-Saharan Africa (Grimes, 1996). The Niger-Congo language family is the largest and by far the most important group as far as tone is concerned. This family stretches from Senegal in the west to Kenya in the east and down into South Africa, and includes the important Bantu language family. Comprehensive surveys of Niger-Congo are available (Welmers, 1973; Bendor-Samuel, 1989), and of tone in general (Fromkin, 1978; van der Hulst and Snider, 1993). Detailed phonetic investigations of African tone languages include Connell and Ladd (1990); Laniran (1992); Liberman et al. (1993).
The isolation form of feather (1a) consists lexically of a low tone on the l@ noun class prefix and a high tone on the root tON. Phrase finally, a high tone is pronounced as a rising contour tone if there is a low tone immediately to the left. The dashed line in (1a) indicates that the prefix low tonespreads onto the root, creating the LH sequence – a rising tone. When a high tone precedes the word, as in (1b), then the high tone spreads onto the prefix, delinking the low tone. Thisfloating low tone then gives rise to downstep. By any standard, the tone systems of most Niger-Congo languages are remarkably complex.
What are the implications for orthography? In a transcriptional orthography we might write tone just as it is pronounced. This would be a shallow orthography, since there would be a transparent relationship between the written form and its pronunciation. An initial problem for many languages would be to cover an essentially arbitrary number of tone levels with a small number of tone marks. A more substantial problem with this approach, for many languages, would be that the resulting orthography might overwhelm the reader with too much irrelevant detail. In a more abstract, ordeep orthography, we might preserve the visual form of words, so that the word l`@tˇON feather is always spelled this way, and the reader just has to know that it is pronounced differently in different contexts, a process that might become automatic after some practice. A wealth of literature exists concerning orthography and its relationship to the reading process. See Frost and Katz (1992) for a collection of recent work in this area. Although informal studies of tone orthography are widespread (see Bird 1998b for a survey), objective experimental work on the writing of tone languages is rarely undertaken; this domain of investigation is uncharted territory. The three studies I am aware of are the subject of the next section.
Experimenting with Tone Orthography
The experimental work on tone languages is rather limited, focusing primarily on the production and perception of tone (Hombert, 1988; Connell and Ladd, 1990; Whalen and Levitt, 1995; Connell and Bird, 1997). I am aware of three formal experiments on reading African tone languages, and these will be described in this section.1 Each experiment makes an important contribution to our understanding of tone orthography and the design of tone orthography experiments. First, Essien’s experiment on three tone orthographies for Efik is discussed, followed with a review of Mfonyam’s work on tone marking in Bafut. Finally we consider Bernard et al.’s experiments on Kom.
Although Essien’s results appear to favour isolation tone marking, no firm conclusion is warranted in the absence of tests for statistical significance of the figures presented in Table 1. Additionally, the accuracy measurements show that readers are not performing better than chance at determining the correct reading of a tone-marked sentence, for either orthography. Perhaps they are simply ignoring the tone marks. More fundamentally, it is difficult to extrapolate from this experiment to normal reading by normal readers. First, the exclusive use of phrases which can be tonally ambiguous in up to five ways, the use of phrases in isolation from context, and the use of nonsense phrases is not typical of normal reading material, as Bernard et al. (1997) also note.
Second, the reliance on readers who have had only ten minutes exposure to the writing system is probably unrealistic. Readers cannot be expected to control a tone marking system in just ten minutes, nor will they have acquired a sight vocabulary (i.e. a set of words that can be recognised without the need to sound them out). Essien justifies the use of novice readers, asserting that we need ‘an orthography that is easiest to read from the learner’s point of view; not from the adept’s point of view’ (Essien, 1977: 162). While one must make concessions to beginning readers, the fate of an orthography should not rest solely with people who first saw the orthography only minutes earlier.
A third problem with extrapolating from these findings to normal reading lies in the way that subjects scanned a whole sentence before reading it aloud. One of the complaints often levelled at zero marking is the way it forces people to read ahead silently for contextual clues. There can be little doubt that zero marking fared so well in this experiment precisely because the reading task gave the subject full access to later material for disambiguation. Despite these methodological problems, Essien’s contribution is of major importance in demonstrating that it is possible to evaluate tone orthographies experimentally. We next turn to the experimental work of Mfonyam (1989) which shows some interesting methodological developments.
Mfonyam 1989: Bafut (Cameroon) Mfonyam’s goal was to establish a tone marking system for a practical orthography of Bafut, a Grassfields Bantu language of Cameroon. His experiment involved four potential tone orthographies. From these candidates the best would be selected and implemented. Mfonyam’s starting point was the belief that writing ought to represent speech, and therefore surface tone should be marked (Mfonyam, 1989: 315). However, he observed that the surface marking of tone made reading difficult and so he decided to experiment with different ways of reducing the amount of tone marking.
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