Abstract
The current study examined the factors underlying native Hebrew speakers’ ability to learn homophonous affix spelling. It takes a novel view in investigating the effect of morpho-orthographic complexity of affix representation on the development of affix spelling across the school years. The role of five morpho-orthographic principles in homophonous affix letter spelling was studied: (i) morpho-orthographic transparency; (ii) affix letter prevalence; (iii) morpho-phonological competition; (iv) overtness of the phonological-orthographic link; and (v) phono-morpho-orthographic consistency. Taken together, these five principles of affix spelling constitute complexity metrics that pinpoint the loci of spelling challenge in homophonous Hebrew affixes. Study participants were 83 monolingual Hebrew-speaking students in four grade levels – 2nd, 4th, 7th, and 10th grades. The research instrument was a spelling task of 244 words containing affix letters in 57 morphological categories. The affixes appearing in the target words represented 56 different affix categories, covering all non-root morphological roles, both inflectional and derivational. While correct spelling increased across grade levels, a hierarchy emerged in interaction with grade level regarding these criteria: Younger spellers were mostly assisted by morpho-orthographic sites, morphological category frequency, and phonological transparency – while spelling in higher grade levels was more affected by morpho-orthographic prevalence. Thus, knowledge of how morphological roles are deployed in the orthography emerges as the most significant factor that affects learning to spell affix letters in Hebrew.
Highlights
The development of spelling skills is essential for children’s literacy acquisition, as it increasingly promotes higher-order writing processes (Stage and Wagner, 1992; Graham and Santangelo, 2014)
We examined the role of five morphoorthographic principles in homophonous affix letter spelling: (i) morpho-orthographic transparency; (ii) affix letter prevalence; (iii) morpho-phonological competition; (iv) overtness of the phonological-orthographic link; and (v) phono-morphoorthographic consistency
These five principles of affix spelling constitute complexity metrics that pinpoint the loci of spelling challenges in homophonous Hebrew affixes. Their examination in the current study provides a fine-grained depiction of the development of affix spelling and the factors that determine the sequence and pace of its acquisition
Summary
The development of spelling skills is essential for children’s literacy acquisition, as it increasingly promotes higher-order writing processes (Stage and Wagner, 1992; Graham and Santangelo, 2014). The goal of spelling is achieving a high-quality lexical fit with correct orthographic representation, which expresses morphological information (Desrochers et al, 2018) To this end, young spellers need to keep track of multiple co-occurrences of different units, monitoring the frequencies, regularities and consistent behavior of phonemes and morphemes in words, on the one hand, and how they are expressed in the specific orthographic patterns of their language, on the other. We hypothesized that word frequency and the morpho-orthographic metrics of affix spelling constitute two separate factors that independently predict different spelling skills across development To investigate this hypothesis, the Affix Letter Spelling Task, representing all affixes and all of their morphological roles in Hebrew, was administered to the study participants, as delineated below. We predicted higher scores on high-frequency words, words with transparent demarcation of root from affix envelope, prevalent affixes, affixes without morphological competition, affixes expressing overt phonological-orthographic links, and affixes with phono-morpho-orthographic consistency
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