Abstract:

Henderson (1984) gives the definition of orthography as ‘the visual pattern of the written language as it relates to the graphemic, phonological and semantic features of the language’. This definition suggests that orthography (the writing system of a language) is not only a visual representation of a spoken language but it also involves phonemic, syntactic and semantic conventions that govern it. This is the reason why there is a general belief in the literature that accurate spelling requires morphophonemic knowledge. Of course, morphophonemic knowledge is not sufficient for spelling all words of a language -especially in English and Greek- because in the case of words whose origins are somewhat ambiguous, morphophonemic knowledge alone can not be utilized in order for the correct spelling of a word to be produced. There is a need of a whole word store (mental lexicon) from where the correct spelling of such a word can be retrieved. Because there is evidence of various factors influencing spelling, especially in languages that are ‘deep’ (for spelling having irregular phoneme-to-grapheme correspondences), investigators are trying to identify which are the different processes that govern spelling production and spelling development. The aim of the present study is to identify these different processes by integrating in the methodology Greek-Cypriot children’s spelling of both Standard Modern Greek words and Cypriot Dialect words.
Because Greek has a deep orthography, it is particularly difficult for most beginning spellers to master. The task of mapping speech onto print may be even more challenging for children who mainly verbally communicate in a dialect. To date, relatively little is known about the relations between dialect use and spelling skills among children who are learning to read and write. The importance of the study lies mainly in the fact that there are very few investigations of spelling in the CD and even fewer, if none, exploring children’s spelling patterns when asked to write in the CD. In Cyprus, Greek-Cypriots commonly verbally communicate using the Cypriot Dialect (CD), whereas, Standard Modern Greek (SMG) is the variety used in education and in most public fora and formal settings; it is the language of the press and of the media at large (Tsiplakou 2004).
The participants of the study were Greek-Cypriot children attending the last four grades of primary school (3rd to 6th grade). Spelling accuracy was examined with a 60-item dictation task in traditional spelling test format. The task included 60 words, half were dictated in SMG and half were dictated in the CD. The data analysis was twofold, firstly an analysis was made looking at children’s spellings when they spelled SMG words, in this analysis additionally to looking at conventional spelling patterns, spelling of dialect sensitive word parts was also investigated. The second analysis was performed for the CD words, spelling of the phonemes that are characteristic of the CD was investigated and the use of morphological knowledge when spelling CD words was also examined. Conclusions are drawn and theoretical and educational implications are made.

Keywords:

Dialect, spelling development, Greek, Cypriot Dialect, Cyprus.