Abstract
The links between oral morphological awareness and the use of derivational morphology are examined in the English word recognition of 8-year-old good and poor readers. Morphological awareness was assessed by a sentence completion task. The role of morphological structure in lexical access was examined by manipulating the presence of embedded words and suffixes in items presented for lexical decision. Good readers were more accurate in the morphological awareness task but did not show facilitation for real derivations even though morpho-semantic information appeared to inform their lexical decisions. The poor readers, who were less accurate, displayed a strong lexicality effect in lexical decision and the presence of an embedded word led to facilitation for words and inhibition for pseudo-words. Overall, the results suggest that both good and poor readers of English are sensitive to the internal structure of written words, with the better readers showing most evidence of morphological analysis.
Highlights
Improvement in children’s understanding of derivational morphology has been associated with vocabulary growth during oral language development (Anglin, 1993), leading to interest in the possibility that increasing morphological knowledge may lead to improvements in lexical access during reading (see Sénéchal and Kearnan (2007) for a review)
Average reading age was at least 11 months behind their chronological age, significantly worse than the good readers: F (1, 28) = 46.40, p < .001, and all of the poor readers performed below the 40th centile on the British Ability Scales (BAS) Word Reading test
This study aimed to examine the link between morphological awareness and the use of morphemic structure in reading complex words
Summary
Improvement in children’s understanding of derivational morphology has been associated with vocabulary growth during oral language development (Anglin, 1993), leading to interest in the possibility that increasing morphological knowledge may lead to improvements in lexical access during reading (see Sénéchal and Kearnan (2007) for a review). In the interactive-activation model developed by Taft (1994), suffixes are represented at the morphemic level, separately from the word level representations of the derivations in which they occur. Stems are represented independently, but at the word level if they are free and at the morphemic level if they are bound. This decompositional perspective can be contrasted with the view that morphologically complex words are recognised through the convergence of codes representing phonological, orthographic and semantic information about those words Morphemes are not stored separately from words; instead the morphological characteristics of a word are due to the weighted connections between orthography, phonology and semantics in the model. Further that during development the frequent occurrence of a suffix like “er” in real derivations like “baker” helps to strengthen the connections between orthography, phonology and semantics, whereas the occurrence of pseudo-derivations such as “corner” reinforces only the orthographic and phonological aspects of the spelling pattern
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