Abstract
Children in the early grades of primary school do not seem to have much awareness of morphemes. In this study, a priming paradigm was used to try to detect early signs of morphological representation of stems through a spelling task presented to Portuguese children (N= 396; age range 6 to 9 years). Primes shared the stem with the targets and contained well-articulated, stressed vowels; the stems of the target words contained non-stressed schwa vowels, which typically result in spelling difficulties. If priming proved effective, the well-articulated vowels in the prime should lead to improvement in the spelling of the schwa vowels in the targets. Primes were presented in two conditions: in only-oral or in oral-plus-written form. Effectiveness of priming was assessed by comparison with a no-priming condition. There was a significant interaction between priming effects and grade. No priming effects were detected in 6- and 7-year-old children; oral-plus-written priming produced higher rates of correct vowel spelling for 8- and 9-year-olds; only-oral priming was effective in improving the vowel spelling of 9-year-olds. Thus the older children used morphological information under priming conditions but there is no evidence to suggest that younger children did so.
Highlights
This study aims to investigate whether it is possible to improve children’s spelling of schwa vowels through the use of morphological primes – activating their implicit knowledge of morphology
If priming proves effective in improving the spelling of a vowel that cannot be identified from phonology, it will be concluded that children can use implicit knowledge to represent morphology in spelling
(1) Older children’s spelling of the schwa vowels in words will improve significantly with priming; this effect may not be observed in the younger children, whose mental lexicon may not contain a separate representation for the stems and affixes
Summary
This study aims to investigate whether it is possible to improve children’s spelling of schwa vowels through the use of morphological primes – activating their implicit knowledge of morphology. “tambor” (drum) has a well articulated vowel, represented by the letter “o”, but “tamborilar” (to drum) has a schwa vowel in the same position, closer to the semivowel /w/. Portuguese primary school children often misspell the vowels in the derived form in these cases because these vowels are not predictable from pronunciation. This study investigated whether it is possible to improve children’s spelling of derived words containing a schwa vowel through priming techniques. If priming proves effective in improving the spelling of a vowel that cannot be identified from phonology, it will be concluded that children can use implicit knowledge to represent morphology in spelling
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