Tone Orthography and Literacy

by David Roberts

"This book presents the results of a series of literacy experiments in ten Niger-Congo languages, representing four language families and spanning five countries. It tests the hypothesis, "To what extent does full tone marking contribute to oral reading fluency, comprehension and writing accuracy, and does that contribution vary from language to language?". One of the main findings is that the ethno-literacy profile of the language community and the social profile of the individual are stronger predictors of reading and writing performance than are the linguistic and orthographic profiles...