Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-gtxcr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-15T17:37:53.769Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 May 2005

ANNUKKA LEHTONEN  and
PETER BRYANT
ANNUKKA LEHTONEN
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
PETER BRYANT
Affiliation:
Oxford Brookes University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 26 , Issue 2 , April 2005 , pp. 137 - 155
Copyright
© 2005 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Arnbak E., & Elbro C. 2000. The effects of morphological awareness training on the reading and spelling skills of young dyslexics. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 44, 229– 251.Google Scholar
Berko J. 1958. The child's learning of English morphology. Word, 14, 150– 177.Google Scholar
Bryant P. E., & Bradley L. 1978. Difficulties in auditory organization as a possible cause of reading backwardness. Nature, 271, 746– 747.Google Scholar
Bryant P. E., Nunes T., & Aidinis A. 1999. Different morphemes, same spelling problems: Cross-linguistic developmental studies. In M. Harris & G. Hatano (Eds.), Learning to read and write: A cross-linguistic perspective (pp. 112– 133). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bryant P., Nunes T., & Bindman M. 2000. The relations between children's linguistic awareness and spelling: The case of the apostrophe. Reading and Writing, 12, 253– 276.Google Scholar
Burani C., Dovetto F., Spuntarelli A., & Thornton A. 1999. Morpho-lexical access and naming: The semantic interpretability of new root–suffix combinations. Brain and Language, 68, 333– 339.Google Scholar
Burani C., Marcolini S., & Stella G. 2002. How early does morpholexical reading develop in readers of a shallow orthography? Brain and Language, 81, 568– 586.Google Scholar
Caramazza A., Laudanna A., & Romani C. 1988. Lexical access and inflectional morphology. Cognition, 28, 297– 332.Google Scholar
Carlisle J. 1988. Knowledge of derivational morphology and spelling ability in fourth, sixth and eighth graders. Applied Psycholinguistics, 9, 247– 266.Google Scholar
Carlisle J. 1995. Morphological awareness and early reading achievement. In L. Feldman (Ed.), Morphological aspects of language processing (pp. 189– 209). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Ehri L. 1995. Phases of development in learning to read words by sight. Journal of Research in Reading, 18, 116– 125.Google Scholar
Hyönä J., Laine M., & Niemi J. 1995. Effects of a word's morphological complexity on readers' eye fixation patterns. In J. M. Findlay, R. W. Kentridge, & R. Walker (Eds.), Eye movement research: Mechanisms, processes and applications (pp. 445– 452). Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Kemp N., & Bryant P. 2003. Do beez buzz? Rule-based and frequency-based knowledge in learning to spell plural -s. Child Development, 74, 63– 74.Google Scholar
Laine M., Niemi J., Koivuselkä–Sallinen P., & Hyönä J. 1995. Morphological processing of polymorphemic nouns in a highly inflected language. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 12, 457– 502.Google Scholar
Laine M., Vainio S., & Hyönä J. 1999. Lexical access routes to nouns in a morphologically rich language. Journal of Memory and Language, 40, 109– 135.Google Scholar
Laudanna A., Badecker W., & Caramazza A. 1992. Processing inflectional and derivational morphology. Journal of Memory and Language, 31, 333– 348.Google Scholar
Lehtonen A. 2002. Finnish or Finish? Learning to spell letter doublets in Finnish: Children's use of orthographic, morphological and phonemic knowledge in spelling acquisition. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Oxford, Oxford.
Lehtonen A., & Bryant P. 2004. Length awareness predicts spelling skills in Finnish. Reading and Writing, 17, 875– 890.Google Scholar
Lyytinen P. 1988. Suomen kielen taivutusmuotojen hallinta 2–9-vuotiailla. [Proficiency of Finnish inflections of 2–9-year-olds.] Jyväskylä: Jyväskylän Yliopiston Monistuskeskus.
Lyytinen P., & Lyytinen H. 2004. Growth and predictive relations of vocabulary and inflectional morphology in children with and without familial risk for dyslexia. Applied Psycholinguistics, 25, 397– 411.Google Scholar
Niemi J., Laine M., & Tuominen J. 1994. Cognitive morphology of Finnish: Foundations of a new model. Language and Cognitive Processes, 9, 423– 446.Google Scholar
Nunes T., Bryant P., & Bindman M. 1997. Morphological spelling strategies: Developmental stages and processes. Developmental Psychology, 33, 637– 647.Google Scholar
Ravid D. 2001. Learning to spell Hebrew: Phonological and morphological factors. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 14, 459– 485.Google Scholar
Ravid D., & Gillis S. (in press). Teachers' perception of spelling patterns and children's spelling errors: A cross-linguistic perspective. In M. Neef, A. Neijt, & R. Sproat (Eds.), Consistency in writing systems. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Rego L. 1999. Phonological awareness, syntactic awareness and learning to read and spell in Brazilian Portuguese. In M. Harris & G. Hatano (Eds.), Learning to read and write: A cross-linguistic perspective (pp. 71– 88). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rubin H. 1988. Morphological knowledge and writing ability. Language and Speech, 31, 337– 355.Google Scholar
Schreuder R. & Baayen R. 1994. Prefix stripping re-revisited. Journal of Memory and Language, 33, 357– 375.Google Scholar
Taft M. 1994. Interactive-activation as a framework for understanding morphological processing. Language and Cognitive Processes, 9, 271– 294.Google Scholar
Taft M., & Forster K. 1975. Lexical storage and retrieval of prefixed words. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 14, 638– 647.Google Scholar
Treiman R., Kessler B., & Bourassa D. 2001. Children's own names influence their spelling. Applied Psycholinguistics, 22, 555– 570.Google Scholar
Tyler A., & Nagy W. 1989. The acquisition of English derivational morphology. Journal of Memory and Language, 28, 649– 667.Google Scholar