Cambridge Journals Online

Active players or just passive bystanders? The role of morphemes in spelling development in a transparent orthography

Abstract

We investigated Finnish children's use of morphological knowledge in spelling. A spelling task and an oral morpheme manipulation task given to first-year children showed that, although morphological facilitation emerged in children's spelling by April of Year 1, this facilitation was not specifically connected to children's morphological knowledge despite a general relationship between spelling and morphological knowledge. Experiment 2, using pseudowords with endings analogous to case inflections, suggested that these caselike endings prompted morphological parsing during spelling. The results suggest that in the transparent Finnish orthography there is no specific connection between morphological knowledge and mastery of certain spelling patterns. Instead, the facilitation arises from the morpheme-based organization of the lexicon and the subsequent parsing of words into their constituent morphemes.