The Dictionary and my obsession to linguistics - Part One

        As someone with dyslexia, I spent the first 18 years of my life in a battle with illiteracy, trying to figure out how to escape the nightmare. I wondered if I would ever break free from the bondage of analphabetism. 

Source: depoistphotos (2022)

Fortunately, I had a professor, Dr. Robert T. Nash who taught me the most valuable skill a human can possess. He taught me to read after I graduated high school with an elementary education reading level. This freed me from an immense psychological pain. He taught me the importance of our alphabetic principle, phonemic awareness, phoneme segmentation, how our spelling is phonetic and other linguistic knowledge (Joshi, Treiman, Carreker, & Moats, 2008), which all came from the Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th edition. This occurred in the summer of 1996 and ever since then I have been obsessed with the dictionary, learning about words and their linguistic structures, which have all freed me. The very first step he taught me about using the dictionary as a learning tool was to become familiar with the guidewords and then to identify how a word is spelled by its left-right sequential sound structure (Moats, 2005). He also taught me to study a headword’s (i.e., graphemes), and then look at the syllabication (phonemes) to the right of it. 

 

I learned the syllabication as it is presented in the Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th edition. I learned how important it was to understand that headwords have ‘centered dots’ located within the bold print of the word. These ‘centered dots’ indicate division points where a hyphen may be put at the end of a line of print or writing, and do not represent the recommended syllabic demarcation. However, on occasion they are the same as are identified in the less than dark print. Thus, it is the small black horizontal hyphen marks within the ‘pronunciation information’ in the less than dark print (syllabication) that tell a reader where the recommended syllable breaks occur (Nash & Robinson, 2022).Using the concept of configuration as the basis for syllabic demarcation enables the student to easily learn and consistently identify with accuracy each of the six syllable types, even those containing a silent letter or letters. For instance, how I use the dictionary and a specific word (i.e., burgeoning) will come Friday in Part 2 of this blog. 

 

As a 44-year-old male with dyslexia, I am constantly studying words. In fact, I spent one weekend encoding and decoding over 300 words from various origins. I utilize a dictionary whenever I can and appreciate the knowledge that is accessible through it for free. Basically, once I was given the tools to self-teach myself to learn about linguistics, I became obsessed and spend most of my days reading the dictionary. 



Sincerely, 

 

Shawn Anthony Robinson PhD

 

 

References: 

 

Joshi, R. M., Treiman, R., Carreker, S., & Moats, L. C. (2008). How words cast their spell. American Educator, 32(4), 6-16.

 

Moats, L. C. (2005). How spelling supports reading. American Educator, 6(12-22), 42.

 

Nash, T., & Robinson, S, A, (2022). Pure and Complete Phonics: Using Simultaneous Tri Multi-Sensory Instructional Procedure. Walsworth.  

 

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