Abstract
The present study investigated whether morphological processing in reading is influenced by the orthographic consistency of a language or its morphological complexity. Developing readers in Grade 3 and skilled adult readers participated in a reading aloud task in four alphabetic orthographies (English, French, German, Italian), which differ in terms of both orthographic consistency and morphological complexity. English is the least consistent, in terms of its spelling-to-sound relationships, as well as the most morphologically sparse, compared to the other three. Two opposing hypotheses were formulated. If orthographic consistency modulated the use of morphology in reading, readers of English should show more robust morphological processing than readers of the other three languages, because morphological units increase the reliability of spelling-to-sound mappings in the English language. In contrast, if the use of morphology in reading depended on the morphological complexity of a language, readers of French, German, and Italian should process morphological units in printed letter strings more efficiently than readers of English. Both developing and skilled readers of English showed greater morphological processing than readers of the other three languages. These results support the idea that the orthographic consistency of a language, rather than its morphological complexity, influences the extent to which morphology is used during reading. We explain our findings within the remit of extant theories of reading acquisition and outline their theoretical and educational implications.
Highlights
General Discussion The present study is the first that uses a tightly-controlled cross-linguistic experimental design to examine whether readers of deep orthographies use morphemes to compute pronunciations
It is worth noting that cross-linguistic differences were even greater for stems than for suffixes, perhaps because of the serial left-to-right nature of the reading aloud task, which requires stem recognition prior to suffix recognition, placing more emphasis on the stem
Stem morphemes are thought to be highly salient units contributing the largest amount of meaning to morphologically complex words (Grainger & Beyersmann, 2017). Another important finding of the present study is that the observed cross-linguistic differences in morphological processing were astonishingly similar for developing and skilled readers. This result is predicted by the Psycholinguistic Grain Size Theory, according to which readers of all alphabetic writing systems have to go through an orthography-to-phonology mapping to acquire reading, but they use different grain sizes to do so
Summary
Our aim was to investigate the processes that are at play when developing readers encounter new words with familiar units
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
