Linguistics Colloquium: David Roberts and Stephen L. Walter

David Roberts and Stephen L. Walter

Title: Investigating the performance of weak and strong readers in ten Niger-Congo tone orthographies

Abstract:

The vast majority of Africa’s 2000+ indigenous languages are tonal, that is, the musical pitch of the voice contributes, along with consonants and vowels, to expressing lexical and grammatical distinctions. Modified Roman script orthographies have been developed for hundreds of these languages, but on the questions of whether, how, and how much tone should be marked, the jury is still out.

Our research project investigated the extent to which full tone marking contributes to oral reading fluency, comprehension and writing accuracy, and whether that contribution varies from language to language. We ran a series of quantitative experiment with 306 participants representing ten Niger-Congo languages in five countries (Cameroon, Nigeria, Benin, Togo and Côte d’Ivoire). Participants orally read texts with full and zero tone marking, and added tones to unmarked texts. Speed, accuracy and comprehension were measured, and a variety of linguistic and demographic variables were tracked.

The performance data suggest that full tone marking is advantageous for weaker readers (who are not necessarily those with fewer years of schooling, since formal education largely ignores local languages), and that stronger readers can read equally well if tone diacritics are absent. This finding prompts us to ask what similarities can be identified between African tone diacritics and Hebrew and Arabic vowel pointing, and whether literacy practitioners in Africa have anything to learn from the Israeli context.

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