Children’s spelling of base, inflected, and derived words: Links with morphological awareness

Abstract

Two studies examined whether young children use their knowledge of the spelling of base words to spell inflected and derived forms. In Study 1, 5-to 9-year-olds wrote the correct letter (s or z) more often to represent the medial /z/ sound of words derived from base forms (e.g., noisy, from noise) than to represent the medial /z/ sound of one-morpheme control words (e.g., busy). In Study 2, 7-to 9-year-olds preserved the spelling of /z/ in pseudoword base forms when writing ostensibly related inflected and derived forms (e.g., kaise-kaisy). In both studies, the children's tendency to preserve the spelling of /z/ between base and inflected/derived words was related to their performance on analogy tasks of morphological awareness. These findings add to the growing body of evidence that children recognise and represent links of meaning between words from relatively early in their writing experience, and that morphological awareness facilitates the spelling of morphologically complex words.

Children’s morphological awareness and reading ability

“…We focused on a particular measure of morphological awareness, an extended Word Analogy task similar to those which had been used successfully in previous studies (Deacon & Kirby, 2004;Kemp, 2006;Nunes et al, 1997a, b). We measured morphological awareness at three points in time (Grades 1, 2, and 3) to examine how it developed and to determine if performance at these three times was differentially related to reading outcomes in Grade 3.…”

“…For example, a participant could be asked to complete patterns such as walk: walked:: shake: ______ (shook) (Nunes, Bryant, & Bindman, 1997a, b; see also Kemp, 2006). In such a task, the subject must recognize a morphological relationship in the first pair of words (involving decomposition) and then apply this relationship to the third word to generate the appropriate word to solve the analogy (production).…”

“…Approximately half of the items had no phonological change (e.g., walk-walked) and the remainder had phonological changes (e.g., stoodstand); of the inflection items, six had phonological changes; of the derivation items, five had phonological changes. Items were modeled on those used by Nunes et al (1997a, b) and Kemp (2006) and are given in the Appendix. No feedback was given for the test items and each of the derivational and inflectional subtasks ended after the participant made four consecutive errors.…”

Morphological Processing Strategies: An Intervention for Spelling Difficulties in English Language

“…In the previous decade, studies focused on the importance of morphological knowledge use in spelling tasks (Carlisle, 1987;Henry, 1993;Sénéchal, Basque, & Leclaire, 2006) and the developmental changes in this use (Carlisle, 1987;Kemp, 2006;Walker, & Hauerwas, 2006); correlational and longitudinal studies focused on strength and nature of relationship between spelling skills and morphological awareness in oral and written tasks (e.g. Muter, & Snowling, 1997;Nunes, Bryant, & Bindman, 1997, 2006.…”

O Conhecimento Morfológico da Criança na Escrita do Português Brasileiro

“…Em favor da primeira hipótese, aparecem estudos que examinam contextos restritos de escrita de palavras, como, por exemplo, a escrita somente da raiz das palavras, ou seja, do morfema comum às palavras de um determinado grupo lexical (Deacon & Bryant, 2006a, 2006bKemp, 2006;Treiman & Cassar, 1996). A associação entre a morfologia e a escrita ortográfica seria feita tão logo a criança começasse a ler e a escrever (Deacon, 2008).…”