Learn High German in Switzerland
In reading and spelling tests, Swiss primary school children often perform worse in the early years than German children of the same age. Why is this the case? One explanation may lie in the different school systems in the German-speaking area. In addition, many different dialects are spoken in Switzerland, which differ greatly from standard High German. And in Germany, in addition to a stylised colloquial language, High German is primarily spoken in everyday life, while Swiss children and adults speak almost exclusively Swiss German. As a result, the use of High German is less prevalent in Switzerland. It is therefore conceivable that less frequent use of High German makes learning this language somewhat more difficult or slows it down.
Swiss children learn High German at school from the first grade onwards. Those who grow up with German neighbours, have a German kindergarten teacher or childminder or watch more television and listen to audio books in High German have a slight advantage.
It's also funny when you talk like the people on TV.
High German - a piece of cake
For these children, it's completely normal that little Lisa or Mrs Müller, for example, speak differently to you. It's also funny when you talk like the people on TV. These children speak an almost accent-free High German even before they start school, even if they don't always get the word order right. This is because children primarily use the Swiss German sentence structure and pronounce words with a High German accent. High German thus literally becomes child's play.
Other children have little contact with High German before they start school. They know what it sounds like and usually understand it well. However, some of them have great difficulty speaking High German themselves. The reason for this is most likely that Swiss German and High German are very similar in some respects, but differ enormously in certain areas. These difficulties can also be observed when reading for the first time.
The difficulty lies in the difference between spoken and written language
When learning to read, children have to combine written and spoken language. However, if the spoken language does not directly correspond to the written version, this can make the learning process of reading and writing more difficult. This mismatch is described by linguists as a kind of «linguistic mismatch».
In various cross-linguistic studies, it has been found that the correspondence between written and everyday language plays an enormously important role in learning to read and write: Learning to read in English, for example, is much more difficult because the pronunciation of a word can be derived less directly from the individual letters than is the case in Italian or Finnish, where letters and speech sounds are consistently related to each other.
The brain probably processes Swiss German and High German differently.
The Swiss German dialect differs from High German on various levels such as vocabulary, sentence structure and sound structure. From a linguistic point of view, it is assumed that differences in sound structure in particular have a major influence on script-to-sound conversion and therefore affect the basic mechanisms of learning to read and write.
Difficult High German production
The «Learning to read and dialect» project at the University of Zurich is focussing on this topic. Using a long-term study, we are investigating how Swiss German and High German are processed in the brains of kindergarten children shortly before they start school and whether there are different strategies depending on which language variant a child speaks from an early age. To do this, we use an electroencephalogram to measure brain activity.
Of particular interest here are differences in phonetic and grammatical language processing. In order to observe the progression of High German acquisition, we examine the same children again a year later and test how well they have learnt to read and write. To summarise, we investigate how well brain activity in kindergarten predicts reading and writing in first grade. We expect that children with Swiss German as their mother tongue will have more difficulty learning to read and write at the beginning, as Swiss German differs greatly from High German in terms of phonology and grammar.
Dialect and High German are similar, but also very different.
Initial results from the kindergarten study suggest that High German and Swiss German are processed differently in the brain and that the parallel existence of dialect and High German may tend to make High German production more difficult. Further analyses at the end of first grade will hopefully provide better insight into the exact causes.
