The effect of morphology on spelling and reading accuracy: a study on Italian children

Abstract

In opaque orthographies knowledge of morphological information helps in achieving reading and spelling accuracy. In transparent orthographies with regular print-to-sound correspondences, such as Italian, the mappings of orthography onto phonology and phonology onto orthography are in principle sufficient to read and spell most words. The present study aimed to investigate the role of morphology in the reading and spelling accuracy of Italian children as a function of school experience to determine whether morphological facilitation was present in children learning a transparent orthography. The reading and spelling performances of 15 third-grade and 15 fifth-grade typically developing children were analyzed. Children read aloud and spelled both low-frequency words and pseudowords. Low-frequency words were manipulated for the presence of morphological structure (morphemic words vs. non-derived words). Morphemic words could also vary for the frequency (high vs. low) of roots and suffixes. Pseudo-words were made up of either a real root and a real derivational suffix in a combination that does not exist in the Italian language or had no morphological constituents. Results showed that, in Italian, morphological information is a useful resource for both reading and spelling. Typically developing children benefitted from the presence of morphological structure when they read and spelled pseudowords; however, in processing low-frequency words, morphology facilitated reading but not spelling. These findings are discussed in terms of morpho-lexical access and successful cooperation between lexical and sublexical processes in reading and spelling.

Morpheme‐based Reading and Spelling in Italian Children with Developmental Dyslexia and Dysorthography

“…Consistently with the findings of Angelelli et al (2014), the morphological facilitation was expected to occur also in the reading and spelling of third-grade typically developing children, in both lexical and non-lexical morphemic stimuli, under the assumption that children of this age when dealing with non-familiar (new or low-frequency) stimuli may take advantage of reading and spelling units (the morphemes) that are more efficient than both whole-word units on the one side, and units corresponding to single phonemes/graphemes on the other. Similarly to what has been observed for morpheme-based reading, morphological facilitation in spelling was expected to occur for both non-lexical and lexical stimuli.…”

“…As in Angelelli et al (2014), 33 filler stimuli were added to the list in order to have similar numbers of words and pseudowords, and similar numbers of morphologically complex and simple stimuli, to assess lexical reading without explicitly inducing morphological decomposition.…”

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

“…According to the above-mentioned literature, morpheme-based reading might allow children to read units smaller than the whole word, but bigger than the grapheme or the syllable (see, for instance, Angelelli et al, 2014). Our study adds to the previous research, by providing compelling evidence about the fact that an explicit measure of morphological awareness could be accounted as a significant predictor of accuracy and speed in words, non-words, and passage reading.…”

“…This study goes further by exploring another possible linguistic predictor of reading: morphological awareness, i.e., the consciousness of how complex words are made up of smaller units and the ability to manipulate those units to generate a new word (Carlisle, 2000;Kuo and Anderson, 2006). Since evidence based on young or impaired readers suggest that they benefit from a morphological parsing strategy in reading (Casalis et al, 2004;in Italian, Burani et al, 2008;Angelelli et al, 2014), it appears important to explore the role that morphological awareness plays in reading development both in monolingual and bilingual populations. In this study, we tested the performance of monolingual and bilingual reading learners on a range of morphological awareness tasks and reading tests.…”

A contribuição da consciência morfológica para a leitura no português brasileiro

“…Por exemplo, mesmo um leitor que até então nunca havia visto ou ouvido a palavra "reexportador" poderia facilmente entender, pela análise dos morfemas, que é referente a alguém que exporta alguma coisa novamente. Assim, a consciência morfológica, habilidade de manipular e refletir sobre as estruturas morfológicas da língua (Carlisle, 1995), pode ser importante para o aprendizado da leitura e da escrita, o que tem levado pesquisadores a investigar essa relação em diferentes línguas (Mota, Anibal, & Lima, 2008;McBride-Chang, Wagner, Muse, Chow, & Shu, 2005;Kirby et al, 2012;Angelilli, Marinelli, & Burani, 2014).…”