Rolando Coto-Solano
LALS Lecturer

We are studying how people learn to read tone in Vietnamese, as well as their ideologies surrounding tone diacritics and spelling variation. First we are studying adults, in order to compare them to younger learners later. Psycholinguistically, adult readers have similar response times for reading segments and tones, which is different from what has been observed for languages like Mandarin, Cantonese and Thai. Qualitatively, Vietnamese speakers do not appear to reproduce the ideologies of "spelling shaming" prevalent in English and Romance languages.