The impact of syntactic and lexical trainings on capitalization of nouns in German in grade five

Abstract

Many orthographies include syntactic markers not represented in phonology. In general, to correctly use these syntactic markers, learners have to analyze and understand the syntactic context of the word to be written. Capitalization of nouns, a syntactic marker in German, involves marking heads of noun phrases and is challenging for learners. The aim of this intervention study was to evaluate the effects of syntactic and lexical based trainings on capitalization of nouns. 114 Luxembourgish fifth-graders were assigned to two syntactic groups, a lexical group and a passive control group. The syntactic groups focused on two variants of training syntactic structures within the noun phrase. The lexical group focused on lexical characteristics of nouns and the control group received reading input. The posttest results show that the students in the intervention groups profited from the syntactic-based training. The follow-up test shows that the intervention was sustainable, as the improvement remains stable. The study indicates that a greater focus on syntactic structures can effectively enhance the use of syntactic markers of capitalizations. Although this approach is initially harder to acquire, it covers all cases of capitalization.

Profiles of poor and good spellers in German noun capitalization

“…Similar to learners with learning disabilities, poor capitalizers might need more extensive explicit instruction in order to detect the inflected NP unit and, thus, the capitalized noun. Intervention studies have already shown that a scaffolded syntactic approach shows positive effects (Bîlici et al, 2019;Brucher et al, 2020;Wahl et al, 2017).…”

“…Nominalizations are words belonging to a different lexical category (e.g., verbs or adjectives) that function as the nucleus of a NP and are thus transformed into a syntactic noun (Korth, 2013). Several empirical studies have shown that capitalization was best for concrete nouns and worst for nominalizations, as well as best for the NP structure DN and worst for N (Betzel, 2015;Bîlici et al, 2019;Brucher et al, 2020;Rautenberg & Wahl, 2019). These studies included children from second grade in primary school to secondary school.…”

Meilensteine im Erwerb der deutschen Orthografie

“…des Graphems (<im Eifer>, <beim Niesen>). Das Erlernen der Großschreibung beginnt in der Grundschule, dabei hat sich die Analyse der Nominalphrase als effektiver didaktischer Ansatz erwiesen (Brucher, Ugen & Weth, 2020;Röber-Siekmeyer, 1999). Zusätzlich zu der Erweiterungsprobe (d. h. ob das Nomen durch Linksattribute beschrieben werden kann: <das vereinbarte Treffen>, <gute Gründe>) soll die Aufmerksamkeit auf die Deklinationen gelenkt werden (vgl.…”

Distinguishing Syntactic Markers From Morphological Markers. A Cross-Linguistic Comparison

“…Training effects are reported for English past-tense spelling (Nunes et al, 1997a) and the apostrophe (Bryant et al, 1997), for French plural markers (Thévenin et al, 1999;Bîlici et al, 2018) and for German (Bîlici et al, 2020). A training that focused on noun phrases in a sentence found effects on capital spelling of nouns, even if controlled with a group that focused on the lexical category noun (Brucher et al, 2020).…”