Which language-internal factors affect students’ capitalization performance in German?

Abstract

In German, sentence-internal capitalization presents a major challenge to writers. Whereas the traditional lexical teaching approach has been under discussion as a potential cause for these orthographic difficulties, the impact of language-internal factors on writers’ performance has received little attention. The present study systematically investigates how syntactic and morphological characteristics of abstract nouns impact capitalization. To achieve this, 1,024 test sentences were constructed, incorporating test words whose morphological structure and syntactic contexts were systematically varied and combined. The test sentences were divided into eight comparable test versions, each containing 128 test sentences, and presented to 168 7th-grade students. The results of the variance analyses reveal that both syntactic and morphological characteristics influence capitalization: the structure of the noun phrase, the presence of nominal suffixes as well the ability of abstract nouns to form plurals affect 7th-grade students’ capitalization performance.