Bayview Beach Resort, Batu Ferringhi Beach, Penang, Malaysia

27-30 September 1999

The Role of Assimilation in Terms of Voiced and Unvoiced Sounds in Reading

Mária Laczkó

Gyál, Tinódi, Hungary

Abstract

The learning of reading and writing (i.e. correct ortography) are often seen as closely interlinked. A very complex process such as reading is based on a special decoding skill through transmission procedure of written words into spoken (pronounced) them. Consequently, however, there is close relationship between speech perception and understanding level and reading acquisition process, the perfect writing and ortographically skill is based not only on correct speech peception and understanding mechanism but perfect reading process at a time. Therefore ortographically skill appears such as the highest grade of communication skills.

Many papers have also demonstrated that the experienced reader is able to understand the written text immediately because his attention focuses on denotative and connotative meaning of the word and syntax (i.e. working of mental lexicon) while the decoding procedure (i.e. perfect and rapid recognation of graphemes (letters) and pheneme correspondence, word and morpheme recognition) is automatic.

The Hungarian language is characterised by these features:

i) In the Hungarian language is clear correspondence between sounds and letters.

ii) Because of the agglutinative character of the Hungarian in this language the words are very long and change because of plenty of stem and suffix alternations.

iii) Among the pronounciation rules there is a special assimilation mechanism in terms of voiced and unvoiced sounds which phonological rule applies within also the morphemes and words.

On the basis of the latest research of spontaneous speech of Hungarian it has been found that the children at the age of 5 are able to put these pronunciation rules into a practice quite well, so the mechanism is quite automatic for them. Our previous findings showed that among the Hungarian children's writings there are a lot of assimilation errors in terms of phonological rules mentioned above.

However, there is no experimentally supported knowledge concerning the effect of the pronunciation rule like assimilation on the reading process. This paper aims at obtaining results about the interrelation of the various types and errors of assimilation rules in terms of voiced and unvoiced sounds in students' reading and their ortography. A series of experiments have been carried out with the participation of primary and secondary for their reading, and later their ortographically skill was also checked by the text. On the basis of our experimental data obtained in their readings and ortography (they will also be discussed in the paper) we will analyse and show the interrelation between them on the one hand and between the possible application of the assimilation rule mentioned above and mental lexicon on the other.