The strength of children's knowledge of the role of root morphemes in the spelling of derived words

Children benefit from morphological relatedness when they learn to spell new words

Use of morphologically related words often helps in selecting among spellings of sounds in French. For instance, final /wa/ may be spelled oi (e.g., envoi “sendoff”), oit (e.g., exploit “exploit”), ois (e.g., siamois, “siamese”), or oie (e.g., joie “joy”). The morphologically complex word exploiter “to exploit”, with a pronounced t, can be used to indicate that the stem exploit is spelled with a silent t. We asked whether 8-year-old children benefited from such cues to learn new spellings. Children read silently stories which included two target nonwords, one presented in an opaque condition and the other in a morphological condition. In the opaque condition, the sentence provided semantic information (e.g., a vensois is a musical instrument) but no morphological information that could justify the spelling of the target word's final sound. Such justification was available in the morphological condition (e.g., the vensoisist plays the vensois instrument, which justifies that vensois includes a final silent s). 30 min after having read the stories, children's orthographic learning was assessed by asking them to choose the correct spelling of each nonword from among three phonologically plausible alternatives (e.g., vensois, vensoit, vensoie). Children chose correct spellings more often in the morphological condition than the opaque condition, even though the root (vensois) had been presented equally often in both conditions. That is, children benefited from information about the spelling of the morphologically complex word to learn the spelling of the stem.

Morphological processing during visual word recognition in developing readers: Evidence from masked priming

Masked priming studies with adult readers have provided evidence for a form-based morpho-orthographic segmentation mechanism that “blindly” decomposes any word with the appearance of morphological complexity. The present studies investigated whether evidence for structural morphological decomposition can be obtained with developing readers. We used a masked primed lexical decision design first adopted by Rastle, Davis, and New (2004), comparing truly suffixed ( golden–GOLD) and pseudosuffixed ( mother–MOTH) prime–target pairs with nonsuffixed controls ( spinach–SPIN). Experiment 1 tested adult readers, showing that priming from both pseudo- and truly suffixed primes could be obtained using our own set of high-frequency word materials. Experiment 2 assessed a group of Year 3 and Year 5 children, but priming only occurred when prime and target shared a true morphological relationship, and not when the relationship was pseudomorphological. This pattern of results indicates that morpho-orthographic decomposition mechanisms do not become automatized until a relatively late stage in reading development.

The metric matters: determining the extent of children's knowledge of morphological spelling regularities

All developmental research needs to carefully consider how children's knowledge is measured. The study of children's knowledge of spelling conventions, or the ways in which the English orthography encodes the roots and affixes and the sounds in words, is no exception. This experiment examined the extent of 7- to 9-year-old children's knowledge of the role of root morphemes in spelling words across different contexts and with different units of assessment. Different writing contexts did not appear to affect children's performance; children were better able to spell the first components of two- than of one-morpheme words (e.g. only free in freely and freeze), both when writing whole words and their first sections (e.g. completing__ or __ly for freely). A second analysis revealed that the unit of coding can influence conclusions. Children demonstrated similar abilities across ages 7 to 9 when only the first segments of words were coded; in contrast, there was evidence of age-related differences when whole word spelling accuracy was assessed. In combination, these results suggest that children's knowledge of the principle of root consistency is remarkably robust to changes in writing context, but that coding is key when drawing conclusions. These findings remind us that the metric matters in studies of spelling, as in other domains, and they offer a manner to reconcile previously conflicting data on spelling development.

The role of morphology in reading and spelling

The accumulated evidence that we reviewed suggests that children make use of regularities in the language--be it phonological, orthographic, and morphological--to read and spell words. Given that languages vary in the clarity with which oral language is represented in writing, one should expect the relative roles of phonological, orthographic, and morphological processing to vary accordingly. In this chapter, we focused on the relative contribution of morphological analysis and awareness to reading and spelling. We found that the morphological information in complex words can facilitate reading and spelling and that knowledge about the morphemic structure of a language can assist a child in reading, spelling, and deriving the meaning of multimorphemic words. The accumulated evidence also demonstrates that morphological awareness contributes to individual differences in reading and spelling that cannot be entirely subsumed to orthographic and phonological processing. Intervention studies on morphological knowledge (i.e., analysis and awareness), however, have not yielded the strong effects that one would have expected. We suspect that more successful intervention studies on how morphological knowledge can enhance literacy warrant a more thorough understanding of the complex interplay between morphological knowledge and a number of different variables such as oral vocabulary, phonological and orthographic awareness, and reading exposure. Given the demonstrated facilitative effects that morphological information can have on reading and spelling along with the particular difficulties that multimorphemic words can pose, researchers argue that systematic and sequential instruction of morphology is needed during the elementary years of schooling. Morphological rules, however, are currently not taught or taught partially to elementary school children. Perhaps, as Carlisle suggests, this is partly due to the fact that educators are more familiar with concepts of phonemes and phoneme awareness than with concepts of morphemes and morphemic awareness. This may change in time as we cumulate stronger scientific evidence on the valuable role of morphological knowledge in reading and spelling.