Syntactic markers and syntactic spelling

Abstract

In this paper, we first summarize the results of studies that have investigated the acquisition, reading, and spelling of noun phrases (NPs) in German and French. Then, we present the assumptions made in those studies. In the main part of the paper, we provide a detailed comparison of German and French noun phrases. There are numerous differences that have never been discussed in this context before; for example, the behavior of articles in German and French and the consequences for graphematic representation, such as sentence-internal capitalization in German.