The origins and evolution of writing was one of the most critical developments in world history, with a range of dramatic transformations in human society ascribed to literacy (Innes 1998: 3). Writing can instigate a revolution in the forms and possibilities of communication and has been directly linked to state formation in many social contexts and time periods across the world (Baines 1995: 4...

This paper presents experimental data that attempts to tie together two different phenomena. First, there is strong evidence that phonemic awareness is strongly influenced by one's writing system such that learning an alphabetic writing system focuses attention on the segment as a unit separate from other larger units, such as syllables. This phenomena may be related to the Developmental Weight...

The story goes back to 1940, with the publication of Quine's Mathematical Logic [5]. He there presents a system of quantificational logic in which only sentences or closed formulas are theorems. In that system, the sole rule of inference is Modus Ponens and the axioms are the universal closures of the following formulas: (1) $, for @ tautologous; (2) Wvb) 1 vcwv~~); (3) qb 3 Vcuj, for o not fre...

Abstract It appears likely that at its peak the classical economy was almost as large of Western Europe during Industrial Revolution. The following review archeological and document evidence indicates three events occurring in first half millennium BC trigger emergence a specialized integrated after 500 BC: (i) growth demand for silver medium exchange economies Near East; (ii) technical breakth...

I suggest four grounds on which an argument can be made that phonological language forms are not merely emergent properties of the public language use of members of a language community. They are: 1) the existence of spontaneous errors of speech production in which whole consonants or vowels misorder or are replaced; 2) the necessary existence of language "particles" used by individual language...

Word embeddings have attracted much attention recently. Different from alphabetic writing systems, Chinese characters are often composed of subcharacter components which are also semantically informative. In this work, we propose an approach to jointly embed Chinese words as well as their characters and fine-grained subcharacter components. We use three likelihoods to evaluate whether the conte...

A central question for any model of visual word identification is the representation of the position at which letters are encoded (e.g., calm vs. clam). In this article, we examine whether the orthographic-specific characteristics of a writing system-namely, Thai-shape the process of letter position coding. Thai is an alphabetic script that lacks interword spaces and has an orthographic order t...

the present study clarifies the difference between orthographic words and their phonological correspondents in persian writing system via computing orthographic depth of persian writing system. in this article, first, the relationship between orthographic forms of the words and their phonological correspondents is formalized by using context free and context sensitive grapheme-phoneme rules. th...

Abstract Being literate empowers individuals to be active citizens and enhances self-esteem, self-confidence, independence. In today’s society, literacy requires much more than alphabetic knowledge. Curriculum documents provide content knowledge for teachers refer as they assess plan the learning needs of their students. However, also have embedded within them particular views on what is taught...