Morphological effects in visual word recognition: Children, adolescents, and adults.

Abstract

The process by which morphologically complex words are recognized and stored is a matter of ongoing debate. A large body of evidence indicates that complex words are automatically decomposed during visual word recognition in adult readers. Research with developing readers is limited and findings are mixed. This study aimed to investigate morphological decomposition in visual word recognition using cross-sectional data. Participants (33 adults, 36 older adolescents [16 to 17 years], 37 younger adolescents [12 to 13 years], and 50 children [7 to 9 years]) completed a timed lexical-decision task comprising 120 items (60 nonwords and 60 real word fillers). Half the nonwords contained a real stem combined with a real suffix (pseudomorphemic nonwords, e.g., earist); the other half used the same stems combined with a nonmorphological ending (control nonwords, e.g., earilt). All age groups were less accurate in rejecting pseudomorphemic nonwords than control nonwords. Adults and older adolescents were also slower to reject pseudomorphemic nonwords compared with control nonwords, but this effect did not emerge for the younger age groups. These findings demonstrate that, like adults, children and adolescents are sensitive to morphological structure in online visual word processing, but that some important changes occur over the course of adolescence.

Is Morphological Awareness a Relevant Predictor of Reading Fluency and Comprehension? New Evidence From Italian Monolingual and Arabic-Italian Bilingual Children

“…For example, Hasenäcker et al (2017) indicate that morphemes progressively emerge as units of word recognition in the course of reading development in German children from 7 years of age up to 9, with peculiar differences between types of affixes (compound, suffixes, etc.). Dawson et al (2017) report qualitative differences in the way English-speaking 7-to 9-year-old process complex words when compared with young and older adolescents, suggesting that (implicit) morphological processing continue to develop up to early adolescence.…”

Morphological awareness and word-level reading in early and middle elementary school years

“…Recent analyses identify a role of awareness of morphology in precisely that task (e.g., Levesque, Kieffer, & Deacon, 2018; see also Deacon & Kirby, 2004), and distinguish morphological awareness from morphological decoding (see Deacon, Tong, & Francis, 2017). Stepping back further, the activation of morphemes in pseudoword tasks has now been identified in both child (e.g., Dawson, Rastle, & Ricketts, 2018) and adult research (e.g., Taft, 2004), and pseudowords have long been used in morphological awareness tasks (Berko, 1958). Overall, these findings need to be integrated into theories of reading development, such that we can identify when morphemes are activated in the reading process.…”

Syllabic Versus Morphemic Analyses: Teaching Multisyllabic Word Reading to Older Struggling Readers

“…Research related to multisyllabic word reading in recent years has focused mainly on adults (e.g., Fracasso et al., ; Gray et al., ; MacArthur, Konold, Glutting, & Alamprese, ; Tighe & Binder, ). Very few studies have examined multisyllabic word reading among older readers in secondary grades (e.g., Bhattacharya & Ehri, ; Crosson, McKeown, Moore, & Ye, ; Dawson et al., ; Goodwin et al., ). Furthermore, studies investigating multisyllabic word reading among adolescent readers have focused largely on proficient rather than struggling readers (e.g., Dawson et al., ; Goodwin et al., ), and research on syllable‐based word reading has not been emphasized much in recent years.…”

“…As readers transition from lower to higher grades, they are exposed to more complex words, which require an ability to break such words into their base words and their inflected or derived forms (i.e., prefixes, suffixes) and elicit meanings of the base words to read the target words, which otherwise cannot be read through pronunciation (Apel & Swank, 1999;Carlisle & Stone, 2005;Goodwin et al, 2013;Tighe & Binder, 2015). Although morphemic analysis, as exemplified in Table 2, can facilitate automatic and rapid reading of complex words (Dawson, Rastle, & Ricketts, 2018) because of development of links among spellings, pronunciations, and meanings (Carlisle, 1988;Goodwin et al, 2013), older struggling readers, compared with proficient readers, often do not have the necessary morphological awareness (Siegel, 2008) and often cannot identify base words and affixes in unfamiliar words to read them accurately and fluently (Apel & Swank, 1999).…”

“…Very few studies have examined multisyllabic word reading among Goodwin et al, 2013). Furthermore, studies investigating multisyllabic word reading among adolescent readers have focused largely on proficient rather than struggling readers (e.g., Dawson et al, 2018;Goodwin et al, 2013), and research on syllable-based word reading has not been emphasized much in recent years. Because older struggling readers may have weak phonological awareness (Fracasso et al, 2016;Gray et al, 2018), which is often reflected through their difficulty with attending to and manipulating the sound structure of spoken words at the syllable, onset-rime, and phoneme levels (Bruck, 1992;Troia, 1999), instruction could focus on advancing older struggling readers' mapping of letter-sound units in words (Fracasso et al, 2016) through syllable-based approaches (Kearns & Whaley, 2019;Toste et al, 2019).…”