Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-s2hrs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-19T17:32:56.117Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Seeing the harm in harmed and harmful: Morphological processing by children in Grades 4, 6, and 8

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 August 2010

S. HÉLÈNE DEACON*
Affiliation:
Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada
EMILY CAMPBELL
Affiliation:
Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada
MEREDITH TAMMINGA
Affiliation:
Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada
JOHN KIRBY
Affiliation:
Queen's University at Kingston
*
ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE S. Hélène Deacon, Department of Psychology, Life Sciences Centre, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS B3H 4J1, Canada. E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract

This study examined morphological processing of inflected and derived words by children in Grades 4, 6, and 8. Participants were shown root forms and inflected, derived, and orthographic control items (e.g., harm, harmed, harmful, or harmony), followed by a fragment completion task (e.g., completing h a_ _). Participants were equally likely to complete the fragment with the target root (e.g., harm for h a_ _) following priming with inflected or derived forms. This reflected a morphological effect; priming scores were higher for the inflected and derived forms than for orthographic counterparts. These effects were consistent across the grades studied, suggesting that morphological processing of inflected and derived words has a similar time course across Grades 4, 6, and 8.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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

REFERENCES

Anglin, J. M. (1993). Knowing versus learning words. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 58, 176186.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berko, J. (1958). The child's learning of English morphology. Word, 14, 150177.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brown, R. (1973). A first language: The early stages. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Carlisle, J. F. (1988). Knowledge of derivational morphology and spelling ability in morphology and spelling ability in fourth, sixth, and eighth graders. Applied Psycholinguistics, 9, 247266.Google Scholar
Carlisle, J. F. (1995). Morphological awareness and early reading achievement. In Feldman, L. B. (Ed.), Morphological aspects of language processing (pp. 189209). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Deacon, S. H., Conrad, N., & Pacton, S. (2008). A statistical learning perspective on children's learning about graphotactic and morphological regularities in spelling. Canadian Psychology on Literacy Development, 49, 118124.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Deacon, S. H., & Dhooge, S. (in press). Developmental stability and changes in the impact of root consistency on children's spelling. Reading and Writing.Google Scholar
Derwing, B., & Baker, W. (1979). Recent research in the acquisition of English morphology. In Fletcher, P. & Garman, M. (Eds.), Language acquisition (pp. 209223). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Derwing, B. L. (1976). Morpheme recognition and the learning of rules in children of differing language backgrounds. Canadian Journal of Linguistics, 21, 3866.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
deVilliers, J. G., & deVilliers, P. A. (1973). A cross-sectional study of the acquisition of grammatical morphemes. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 2, 267–227.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Feldman, L. B. (1994). Beyond orthography and phonology: Differences between inflections and derivations. Journal of Memory and Language, 33, 442470.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Feldman, L. B. (2000). Are morphological effects distinguishable from the effects of shared meaning and shared form? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 26, 14311444.Google ScholarPubMed
Feldman, L. B., Rueckl, J., DiLiberto, K., Pastizzo, M., & Vellutino, F. R. (2002). Morphological analysis by child readers as revealed by the fragment completion task. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 9, 529553.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Feldman, L. B., Soltano, E. G., Pastizzo, M. J., & Francis, S. E. (2004). What do graded effects of semantic transparency reveal about morphological processing? Brain and Language, 90, 1730.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Frost, R., Deutsch, A., Gilboa, O., Tannenbaum, M., & Marslen-Wilson, W. (2000). Morphological priming: Dissociation of phonological, semantic and morphological factors. Memory & Cognition, 28, 12771288.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gerken, L., Landau, B., & Remez, R. (1990). Function morphemes in young children's speech perception and production. Developmental Psychology, 26, 204216.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Giraudo, H. (2001). Rôle et représentation de l'information morphologique chez l'apprenti lecteur et l'enfant dyslexique [Role and representation of morphological information in beginning readers and dyslexic children]. Annals de Fondation Fyssen, 16, 8190.Google Scholar
Gonnerman, L. M., Seidenberg, M. S., & Anderson, E. S. (2007). Graded semantic and phonological similarity effects in priming: Evidence for a distributed connectionist approach to morphology. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 136, 323345.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jarvis, B. (2000). DirectRT (Version 2000.4.9) [Computer software]. New York: Empirisoft.Google Scholar
Marslen-Wilson, W., Tyler, L. K., Waksler, R., & Older, L. (1994). Morphology and meaning in the English Lexicon. Psychological Review, 101, 333.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Meunier, F., & Segui, J. (1999). Morphological priming effect: The role of surface frequency. Brain and Language, 68, 5460.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Naito, M. (1990). Repetition priming in children and adults: Age-related dissociation between implicit and explicit memory. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 50, 462484.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nunes, T., Bryant, P., & Bindman, M. (1997). Morphological spelling strategies: Developmental stages and processes. Developmental Psychology, 33, 637649.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pacton, S., Fayol, M., & Perruchet, P. (2005). Children's implicit learning of graphotactic and morphological regularities. Child Development, 76, 324339.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pinker, S. (1991). Rules of language. Science, 253, 530535.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Raaijmakers, J., Schrijnemakers, J., & Gremmen, F. (1999). How to deal with “the language as fixed effect fallacy”: Common misconceptions and alternative solutions. Journal of Memory and Language, 41, 416426.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rabin, J., & Deacon, S. H. (2008). The representation of morphologically complex words in the developing lexicon. Journal of Child Language, 35, 453465.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Raveh, M. (2002). The contribution of frequency and semantic similarity to morphological processing. Brain and Language, 81, 312325.Google Scholar
Raveh, M., & Rueckl, J. G. (2000). Equivalent effects of inflected and derived primes: Long-term morphological priming in fragment completion and lexical decision. Journal of Memory and Language, 42, 103119.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rueckl, J. G., Mikolinski, M., Raveh, M., Miner, C. S., & Mars, F. (1997). Morphological priming, fragment completion, and connectionist networks. Journal of Memory and Language, 36, 382405.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schreuder, R., & Baayen, R. H. (1995). Modeling morphological processing. In Feldman, L. B. (Ed.), Morphological aspects of language processing (pp. 131156). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Selby, S. (1972). The development of morphological rules in children. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 42, 293299.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stanners, R. F., Neiser, J. J., & Hernon, W. P. (1979). Memory representation for morphologically related words. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 18, 399412.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tyler, A., & Nagy, W. (1989). The acquisition of English derivational morphology. Journal of Memory and Language, 28, 649667.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wysocki, K., & Jenkins, J. R. (1987). Deriving word meanings through morphological generalization. Reading Research Quarterly, 22, 6681.Google Scholar
Zeno, S. M., Ivens, S. H., Millard, R. T., & Duvvuri, R. (1995). The educator's word frequency guide. New York: Touchstone Applied Science Associates.Google Scholar