Worttrennung am Zeilenende - Über die deutschen Worttrennungsregeln, ihr Erlernen in der Grundschule und das Lesen getrennter Wörter

In the first part of his study, the author describes the rules for hyphenating German words in such a way that the surprisingly complex interaction between the rules becomes clear; in this, his account differs from the official rules. It elaborates a characteristic feature of hyphenation rules, namely that a distinction has to be made between 'stronger' and 'weaker' rules. In the second part, he presents empirical studies which firstly - and for the first time - analyse readers' eye movements when reading hyphenated words, and secondly analyse how primary school pupils hyphenate.


Jochen Geilfuß-Wolfgang, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz.