Resumen

QUEREJETA, Maira; PIACENTE, Telma; GUERRERO ORTIZ-HERNAN, Bárbara  y  ALVA CANTO, Elda Alicia. Word separation in the writing of children beginning primary school. Interdisciplinaria [online]. 2013, vol.30, n.1, pp.45-64. ISSN 1668-7027.

In conventional writing of sentences and texts, the words are separated by blank spaces. However, the beginnings of literacy often observed hypo-segmentations and hyper-segmentations between words. Hypo-segmentation occurs when adequate separation between words is missing, whereas hyper-segmentation takes place when a word is separated incorrectly and a space is inserted between two of its elements. Research on this topic is scarce and has registered the appearance of arbitrary joints and separations both in content and functional words, but has failed to account for all of the phenomena observed in children's writing. This paper has two aims: first of all, characterize the type and frequency of the unconventional separations between words written at the end of the first year of primary schooling in Mexican and Argentinian children, by reason of the different literacy modalities of both countries. The expectations prescribed in the curricula of both countries are different: Mexico expected children to learn to read and write words and sentences at the end of preschool. In Argentina those expectations are related to the first cycle of primary schooling. Regarding the teaching methodologies to which the children screened were exposed, although it is not possible to characterize them as exhaustive, since teachers often introduce different variants, they are predominantly phonic in the case of Mexico, and derived from the psychogenesis of the language written in the case of Argentina. Second, identifying the possible connection between these phenomena and variables as reading, writing and vocabulary performance range. Therefore, thirty Argentinian and Mexican children between six and seven years of age (mean age: six years and nine months) were examined through (both spontaneous and dictated) writing, reading and vocabulary tests. The notion of morphological formants was used to linguistic analysis of child productions; this allowed for the categorization of all the unconventional segmentations which came up. Among some of the results of this study, we would like that the proposed classification turned out to be extremely useful and even more adequate than other classifications in terms of word -function and word -content. Secondly, it should be pointed out that unconventional separations were more frequently observed in dictations. Thirdly, Mexican children obtained higher scores when reading words and pseudo-words, which demonstrate that they have better control of the alphabetic principle in comparison with the Argentinian ones. Fourthly, and in agreement with other research, hypo-segmentation frequency of appearance turned out to be higher than hyper-segmentation, both groups displaying similar characteristics. On the one hand, the average scores for the mistakes made failed to show any significant differences in terms of children's nationalities. On the other hand, even though such hypo-segmentations mostly appeared due to union of a lexical and a grammatical formant, in other cases only lexical or grammatical formants were joined, which proves once again how useful the categorization was. Finally, correlations with the levels of word reading and writing, reading comprehension and vocabulary range turned out to be low. In connection with this, with the limitations of the case number, it can be pointed out that wrong segmentation goes beyond the children's performance within such variables and seems to be an evolutive stage within the progressive control of reflection upon and conscious manipulation of lexical items. It would prove interesting to increase the study to one larger number of participants and made longitudinal studies, during the schooling process enabling to clear out the evolution of the phenomena examined throughout the schooling period. It should be pointed out that unconventional word separations are not always spotted at school and that their persistence, unless proper intervention strategies are used, may have subsequent repercussions on text production, which corresponds to more advanced schooling levels.

Palabras clave : Children; Writing; Word segmentation; Hypo-segmentation; Hyper-segmentation.

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