Correspondence: Sonali Nag, The Promise Foundation, 346/2, 1st A Main, Koramangala 8th Block, Bangalore 560 095, India. E-mail: sonalinag@t-p-f.org 41 Writing Systems Research, Vol. 2, No. 1, 2010, 41–52. © The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org doi:10.1093/wsr/wsq001 Advance Access published on 4 March 2010 Learning to spell in an alphasyllabary: The case of Kannada Sonali Nag The Promise Foundation, India and Centre for Reading and Language, University of York, UK Rebecca Treiman Department of Psychology, Washington University in St. Louis, USA Margaret J. Snowling Centre for Reading and Language, University of York, UK Abstract We investigated children’s spelling in the alphasyllabic writing system of Kannada, a South Indian language. Kannada represents language at roughly the level of the syllable, but its symbols or ‘akshara’ can be segmented visually to reveal the consonant and vowel segments within. Having been taught akshara as whole, fourth- and fifth-grade children were poor at constructing complex akshara from their consonant and vowel segments. Analyses of their errors showed confu- sions between the symbols for phonologically similar consonants, visually based errors, particularly on small diacritic marks, and influences of dialect. Kannada has been considered a transparent writing system, but the challenges that arise in mastering this visuo-spatially complex and extensive orthography suggest that previous studies have missed certain factors that contribute to the ease or difficulty with which a writing system is learned. 1 Introduction All writing systems represent language, but they differ in how they do so. Whereas alphabetic scripts represent speech at the level of the phoneme, syllabaries represent it at the level of syllables. ‘Alphasyllabaries’ (sometimes also called abugidas) have characteristics of both alphabets and syllabaries (Bright, 1996; Daniels, 1996; Sproat, 2006). These writing systems use graphic complexes that corre- spond roughly to syllables, but these symbols can be decomposed to show the phonemes within them. For example, the Kannada symbol , or ‘ke’ in the Romanized form that we use at some points in this article, stands for /ke/. It is composed of a subpart that represents the phoneme /k/, , and a subpart that represents the phoneme /e/, ; these subparts recur in other syllables that include /k/ and /e/. [The phoneme symbols we use are from the alphabet of the International Phonetic Association (IPA), 1999.] Although much research has been done on the acquisition of alphabetic writing systems, especially English, less is known about the acquisition of other systems. This situation has justifiably raised doubts Downloaded by [Washington University in St Louis] at 13:39 05 December 2014