The Development of Graphic Words in Written Spanish

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the development of graphic words in early writing. Its aim is to gain a deeper understanding of children’s motives for leaving or not blank spaces between letters or strings of letters. Previous studies in different languages have found four aspects that seem to influence children’s decision for creating blanks: (1) Type of text, which affects external text boundaries from very early on; 2) Syntactic category of words and syntactic context, which affect internal chunking of graphic marks within the boundaries of a text; (3) Kind of handwriting (linked cursive vs. separate print), which may facilitate or hinder children’s identification of graphic words, and (4) Length of texts, which seems also to affect children’s separation of strings of marks.

A closer analysis of individual cases revealed, that some of them resist generalization; these cases appear as a sort of counterexample to the observed regularities. We have decided to look both at the observed regularities and at the counterexamples. The idea is to use them to call attention to the many aspects that may affect children’s decision to create blanks and may be blurred when focusing just on the regularities.