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Functions of Upper-Case Letters in an Old Polish Manuscript. Karta Rogawskiego The use of capital letters in Old Polish manuscripts is an unexplored subject. The present article is an analysis of the function of capital letters in Karta Rogawskiego (‘Rogawski’s Card’), a fifteenth-century Polish-language manuscript. Despite the small size of the monument (175 lines), it contains 70 upper-case letters, used consciously and consistently. In this respect, the text is unique compared to other mediaeval monuments in Polish. In Karta Rogawskiego, upper-case letters perform two functions. One is the rhetoric-syntactic function, i.e. they segment the text, introduce additional comments, start integrals which describe the activities of other characters and, above all, they introduce utterances of individual characters, separating the citation from the introduction. The other role of upper-case letters is the stylistic-semantic function, when they are used at the beginning of proper names. In the case of important words, it can be seen that their use is conscious and consistent; e.g. the word cesarz ‘emperor’ is always spelt with an upper-case letter when it refers to a specific person, and with a lower-case one when it only means a function. In addition, upper-case letters appear in the same places in the text, i.e. at the beginnings of titles and chapters.

The use of capital letters in Old Polish manuscripts is an unexplored subject. The present article is an analysis of the function of capital letters in Karta Rogawskiego ('Rogawski's Card'), a fifteenth- -century Polish-language manuscript. Despite the small size of the monument (175 lines), it contains 2' upper-case letters, used consciously and consistently. In this respect, the text is unique compared to other mediaeval monuments in Polish. In Karta Rogawskiego, upper-case letters perform two functions. One is the rhetoric-syntactic function, i.e. they segment the text, introduce additional comments, start integrals which describe the activities of other characters and, above all, they introduce utterances of individual characters, separating the citation from the introduction. The other role of upper-case letters is the stylistic-semantic function, when they are used at the beginning of proper names. In the case of important words, it can be seen that their use is conscious and consistent; e.g. the word cesarz 'emperor' is always spelt with an upper-case letter when it refers to a specific person, and with a lower-case one when it only means a function. In addition, upper-case letters appear in the same places in the text, i.e. at the beginnings of titles and chapters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Upper-case text is considered detrimental to the reading comprehension of second language learners of English. Little is known about the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying the processing of upper-case text. To investigate this issue, Korean students (n = 23) performed 40 reading trials, and their reading comprehension of text written in either upper- or lower-case letters was recorded while their brain activities were scanned with functional magnetic resonance imaging. Compared to lower-case text, upper-case text elicited greater activation of the primary visual areas in both hemispheres associated with orthographic processing. In contrast, lower-case text increased neural activity in brain regions associated with higher-order reading comprehension processes (e.g. the integration of text information) and the premotor cortex. Collectively, based on automacity theory, these results suggested that upper-case text interferes with reading comprehension because it requires increased orthographic processing, which in turn leaves fewer neural resources for phonological processing and higher-order reading comprehension processes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the Jackson and Coltheart theory of acquisition of word reading it is claimed that, near the beginning of the partial alphabetic phase of development, children have full use of abstract letter units (ALUs). This claim and less exclusive alternatives were examined. In Experiment 1, normal progress children with on average 9 months of school reading instruction, either with or without explicit phonics, read with moderate accuracy (orthographically) familiar words in upper-case letters (e.g., AND) that are visually dissimilar from their lower-case forms. Lower-case forms were read with greater accuracy but only for familiar words, there being no letter-case effect for less familiar words. Children with explicit phonics showed less impairment in reading accuracy when words were presented in upper-case form than children without such phonics. Children with on average 22 months of instruction, in Experiment 2, read relatively unfamiliar words that required some phonological mediation. Those without explicit phonics instruction read words with digraphs in unfamiliar upper case less accurately than in lower case, while those with explicit phonics showed no such letter-case difference. The results supported the view that children do not have full use of ALUs in early alphabetic reading, both children with and without explicit phonics to some extent using letter identities specific to lower case for representation of familiar words. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]