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Getting to the root: young writers' sensitivity to the role of root morphemes in the spelling of inflected and derived words

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 May 2006

S. HÉLÈNE DEACON  and
PETER BRYANT
S. HÉLÈNE DEACON
Affiliation:
Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada
PETER BRYANT
Affiliation:
University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
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Abstract

The English orthography is morphophonemic: spellings encode both morphemes and phonemes. Questions of the starting point and extent of young children's understanding of the link between morphemes and spelling are important for theories of spelling development. We conducted two experiments to address these issues. In Experiment 1, 65 six- to eight-year-old English-speaking children spelled just the first sections of inflected, derived and control words. Their spelling of these first segments was better in inflected and derived words than in control words. The findings were replicated in Experiment 2 with 78 six- to eight-year-old children spelling a greater number of items. These two studies converge on the conclusion that, in specific testing situations, six- to eight-year-old children appreciate the role of root morphemes in the spelling of both inflected and derived words. These results are discussed in relation to current models of spelling development.

Type
Note
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 33 , Issue 2 , May 2006 , pp. 401 - 417
Copyright
© 2006 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

We are indebted to the children who spelled many words for us and to the teachers who opened their schools to us. A summary of Experiment 1 was published as part of a chapter entitled Morphology and spelling by Bryant, P. E., Deacon, S. H. & Nunes, T. in R. M. Joshi & P. G. Aaron (eds), Handbook of orthography and literacy (2006). Portions of these studies were also presented at the NATO Advanced Study Institute on Literacy acquisition, assessment & intervention: the role of phonology, orthography, and morphology and at the 2001 meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading where we received interesting questions and helpful comments. Thanks to Noshin Samji who helped to code the data and to Annukka Lehtonen who provided useful suggestions on an earlier draft of this paper. This research was supported by a Rhodes Scholarship awarded to the first author.