WLA3 morphology and spelling

WLA3. The usage of morphological information for learning the spelling of new words

Responsible: Sébastien Pacton (LMC)

Other members: Séverine Casalis, Jean-Noël Foulin, Rebecca Treiman.

Description

In French, as in English and some other languages, the spellings of some words are motivated by those of morphologically related words. For instance, final /wɑ/ may be spelled oi (e.g., envoi ‘sendoff’), oit (e.g., exploit ‘exploit’), ois (e.g., siamois, ‘siamese’), or oie (e.g., joie ‘joy’). The morphologically complex word exploiter ‘to exploit’, with a pronounced t, can be used to indicate that the stem exploit is spelled with a silent t. Several studies have suggested that children begin to do so as early as in first year of formal schooling, based on evidence that they spell words that have morphologically relatives better than words that do not (e.g., Sénéchal, 2000 in French; Treiman et al., 1994 in English). However, most of these previous studies have an important limitation. Even if specific words are balanced for frequency, the observed difference in spelling performance between words with morphological relatives and those without could reflect a difference in the frequency of particular target segments within words. For example the segment dirt in dirty, which also occurs in dirty and dirtiness, is more frequent than the segment dut in duty, which occurs only in duty. 

The aim of the present project was to investigate whether children benefited from morphological cues to learn new spellings. Children were asked to read stories which included two target nonwords, one presented in an opaque condition and the other in a morphological condition. In the opaque condition, the sentence provided semantic information (e.g., a vensoit is a musical instrument) but no morphological information that could justify the spelling of the target word’s final sound. Such justification was available in the morphological condition (e.g., the vensoitist plays the vensoit instrument, which justifies that vensoit includes a final silent t). The hypothesis was that children benefit from information about the spelling of the morphologically complex word to learn the spelling of the stem, and therefore that they should learn new spellings presented in the morphological condition better than those presented in the opaque condition, even when the root was presented equally often in both cases.

Pacton, S., Deacon, S.H., Borchardt, G., Danjon, J., & Fayol, M. (2011). Why should we take graphotactic and morphological regularities into account when examining spelling acquisition? In V. Berninger (Eds.) Past, Present, and Future Contributions of Cognitive Writing Research to Cognitive Psychology (pp. 333-358). USA: Taylor and Francis.

Pacton, S., Foulin, J.N., Casalis, S., & Treiman, R. (submitted). Children benefit from morphological relatedness when they learn to spell new words.