Spelling of Inflected Verb Morphology in Children with Spelling Deficits

Children with spelling deficits demonstrate significant difficulty using inflectional morphology in their writing. This study investigated whether phonological deficits account for these pronounced difficulties or if they are more accurately explained by limitations in morphological or orthographic awareness. Twenty–six 11—13–year–old children with spelling deficits, 31 younger spelling–level–matched children, and 31 age–matched children were asked to spell a series of verbs with past tense and progressive markers in dictated sentences and in list form. Performance on spelling tasks was compared to performance on phonological, morphological, and orthographic awareness tasks. Results suggest that children with spelling deficits have significant difficulty including inflections as well as spelling inflections and base words. Difficulty was most pronounced in a sentence context. Ability to spell inflectional forms was related to variation in morphological awareness in children with spelling deficits and to variation in orthographic awareness in spelling–level–matched children.     

Examining Word Factors and Child Factors for Acquisition of Conditional Sound-Spelling Consistencies: A Longitudinal Study

It has been suggested that children acquire spelling by picking up conditional sound-spelling consistencies. To examine this hypothesis, we investigated how variation in word characteristics (words that vary systematically in terms of phoneme-grapheme correspondences) and child factors (individual differences in the ability to extract phonological, morphological, and orthographic information) simultaneously relates to spelling accuracy. A total of 143 Korean-speaking children were assessed on spelling 4 times from prekindergarten to kindergarten. Words in the spelling task systematically varied in orthographic transparency stemming from phonological shifts. At Time 1 they were also assessed on emergent literacy or linguistic awareness skills (e.g., phonological awareness, morphological awareness, letter-name knowledge). Explanatory item response model revealed that (a) growth trajectories of spelling differed as a function of orthographic transparency, and (b) the effect of emergent literacy skills on words of varying transparency differed as a function of children’s emergent literacy skill levels and time.     

The role of orthographic and phonological processing skills in the reading and spelling of monolingual Persian children

The main objective of the present study was to examine the contribution of phonological and orthographic skills to Persian reading and spelling. The Persian language is of interest because it has very consistent grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences, but somewhat inconsistent phoneme-to-grapheme correspondences. Reading, spelling, phonological, and orthographic skills were tested in a sample of 109 monolingual Persian students (mean age = 8;1, SD = 4 mo) attending Grade 2 in Iran. The results showed that although monolingual Persian children relied both on phonological and orthographic skills, phonological skills were a strong predictor for both reading and spelling. Another objective of the study was to compare children’s spelling performance in terms of phoneme-to-grapheme (PG) consistencies. As expected, children spelled PG-consistent words more accurately than PG-inconsistent words. Moreover, they relied more on orthographic skills for spelling PG-inconsistent words than for spelling PG-consistent words. The results are discussed in terms of the differential effect of orthographic consistency on reading and spelling.     

The use of morphological knowledge in spelling derived forms by learning-disabled and normal students

Currently popular systems for classification of spelling words or errors emphasize the learning of phoneme-grapheme correspondences and memorization of irregular words, but do not take into account the morphophonemic nature of the English language. This study is based on the premise that knowledge of the morphological rules of derivational morphology is acquired developmentally and is related to the spelling abilities of both normal and learning-disabled (LD) students. It addresses three issues: 1) how the learning of derivational morphology and the spelling of derived words by LD students compares to that of normal students; 2) whether LD students learn derived forms rulefully; and 3) the extent to which LD and normal students use knowledge of relationships between base and derived forms to spell derived words (e.g. “magic” and “magician”). The results showed that LD ninth graders’ knowledge of derivational morphology was equivalent to that of normal sixth graders, following similar patterns of mastery of orthographic and phonological rules, but that their spelling of derived forms was equivalent to that of the fourth graders. Thus, they know more about derivational morphology than they use in spelling. In addition, they were significantly more apt to spell derived words as whole words, without regard for morphemic structure, than even the fourth graders. Nonetheless, most of the LD spelling errors were phonetically acceptable, suggesting that their misspellings cannot be attributed primarily to poor knowledge of phoneme-grapheme correspondences. I am indebted to Laurel Fais and students in the Language Training program at the Forman School in Litchfield, Connecticut, for their participation in this study. The first phase of this research project was sponsored by NICHD grant HD-01994 to Haskins Laboratories and by a Dissertation Fellowship from the University of Connecticut. The final stages of work on this project were completed while I was at American International College.     

The development of orthographic and phonological strategies for the decoding of words in children

This study examined the use of orthographic and phonological deletion strategies by children in the 6–16‐year age range. Children from Grades 1 to 10 (n=191) were presented either visually or orally isolated words and were asked to pronounce these words using either an orthographic (spelling) strategy following mental deletion of one letter, or a phonological (sounding) strategy following mental deletion of one sound. All children performed additional reading and spelling tasks in which they read and spelt all the words and derivatives from the deletion tasks. Analysis of variance revealed that younger readers were more accurate when using phonological strategies than when using orthographic strategies, whereas older readers showed superior orthographic and phonological processing abilities. Generally the results supported the suggestion that phonological and orthographic processing ability increase with age, and that the increase in these abilities with age is not solely dependent on reading and spelling ability.     

The relations between children's linguistic awareness and spelling: The case of the apostrophe

In a longitudinal study, we looked at the link between children'sunderstanding of a morphemically-based orthographic rule and theirawareness of morphemic distinctions. The orthographic rule in question wasthe use of the apostrophe to denote possession in English. Early on in thestudy, we gave the children phonological, semantic/syntactic and morpho-syntactic awareness tasks, and later we gave them a spelling task in whichthey had to write words which were either genitives (e.g., `boy's') ornominative or accusative plurals (e.g., `boys'). Eight- to 10-year-oldchildren found this task difficult, but their performance improved to someextent with age. The morpho-syntactic, but not the phonological orsemantic/syntactic, awareness tasks predicted how well the children placedapostrophes in genitive words and omitted them from plural words. Weconclude that different forms of linguistic awareness affect differentaspects of reading and spelling. Learning about spelling patterns based onmorphemes is heavily influenced by children's morpho-syntactic awarenessbut not, apparently, by other forms of linguistic awareness.     

Measures of Kindergarten Spelling and Their Relations to Later Spelling Performance

Learning the orthographic forms of words is important for both spelling and reading. To determine whether some methods of scoring children’s early spellings predict later spelling performance better than do other methods, we analyzed data from 374 U.S. and Australian children who took a 10-word spelling test at the end of kindergarten (M age = 6 years 2 months) and a standardized spelling test approximately 2 years later. Surprisingly, scoring methods that took account of phonological plausibility did not outperform methods that were based only on orthographic correctness. The scoring method that is most widely used in research with young children, which allots a certain number of points to each word and which considers both orthographic and phonological plausibility, did not rise to the top as a predictor. Prediction of Grade 2 spelling performance was improved to a small extent by considering children’s tendency to reverse letters in kindergarten.     

Productive knowledge of derivational rules in poor readers

The present report with two complementary experiments examined the productive knowledge of derivational morphology in 75 grade 4, 5, and 6 “poor” readers further divided into those performing better, or worse, inboth reading and spelling ((R + S +) or R − S −)), or better in the one or the other (mixed) subgroups. Experiment 1 required individual subjects to vocalize rapidly the derived forms of words when primed with 40 target base words in four derivational conditions or levels embedded in sentence frames shown on the computer screen. Experiment 2 required the reverse process of vocalizing the base forms of words when primed with 40, complex derived forms in the same four morphology conditions embedded in sentence frames shown on the computer screen. Results of the analysis of the reaction times show a developmental trend and that the subgroups of poor readers used different mechanisms in producing derived or base forms of words according to the complexity of the orthographic and/or phonological changes needed in the derivational process. The important role of morphemic structure and origin of words in instruction is emphasized.     

Cross-language transfer of phonological and orthographic processing skills from Spanish L1 to English L2

Previous cross-language research has focused on L1 phonological processing and its relation to L2 reading. Less extensive is the research on the effect that L1 orthographic processing skill has on L2 reading and spelling. This study was designed to investigate how reading and spelling acquisition in English (L2) is influenced by phonological and orthographic processing skills in Spanish (L1) in 89 Spanish-English bilingual children in grades 2 and 3. Comparable measures in English and Spanish tapping phonological and orthographic processing were administered to the bilingual children. We found that cross-language phonological and orthographic transfer occurs from Spanish to English. Specifically, the Spanish phoneme deletion task contributed a significant amount of unique variance to English word reading and spelling, for both real words and pseudowords. The Spanish homophone choice task predicted English reading, but not spelling. Taken together, these results suggest that there are shared phonological and orthographic processes in bilingual reading; however, orthographic patterns may be language specific, thereby not likely to transfer to spelling performance.     

Knowledge about word structure in beginning readers: what specific links are there with word reading and spelling?

The present study had two aims: (1) to examine kindergarten (Kg) and first grade (G1) children’s early word structure knowledge, that is letter, phonological, morphological, and orthographic knowledge, and (2) to provide evidence of specific links between these various types of knowledge and word reading and spelling performance assessed in G1. A short longitudinal study was conducted with French-speaking children. Beyond phonological and morphological knowledge, identified here as in many other studies, the results provided evidence of a level of orthographic knowledge in the Kg children who exhibited an ability to process graphotactic constraints (i.e., legal combinations of letters). Moreover, whatever the type of items (affixed, pseudo-affixed, regular, or irregular words) being processed, either in reading or in spelling, letter naming was seen to be the strongest predictor of reading and spelling performance. The second important predictor related to phonological knowledge and more particularly phoneme extraction as a proximal predictor. Morphological knowledge appeared to be less important, and finally, the smallest contribution was made by orthographic knowledge.     

Spelling in Children With Dyslexia: Analyses From the Treiman-Bourassa Early Spelling Test

We examined the oral and written spelling performance on the Treiman-Bourassa Early Spelling Test (Treiman & Bourassa, 2000a) of 30 children with serious reading and spelling problems and 30 spelling-level-matched younger children who were progressing normally in learning to read and spell. The 2 groups' spellings were equivalent on a composite measure of phonological and orthographic sophistication, representation of the phonological skeleton of the items, and orthographic legality. The groups showed a similar advantage for words over nonwords on the phonological skeleton and orthographic legality measures. The children with dyslexia and the comparison children also showed an equivalent advantage for written over oral spelling on the composite and phonological skeleton measures. Further analyses revealed that children with dyslexia made many of the same linguistically based errors as typically developing children but also pointed to some subtle differences between the groups. Overall, the spelling performance of children with dyslexia appears to be quite similar to that of normally progressing younger children.     

Children’s spelling of base, inflected, and derived words: Links with morphological awareness

Two studies examined whether young children use their knowledge of the spelling of base words to spell inflected and derived forms. In Study 1, 5- to 9-year-olds wrote the correct letter (s or z) more often to represent the medial /z/ sound of words derived from base forms (e.g., noisy, from noise) than to represent the medial /z/ sound of one-morpheme control words (e.g., busy). In Study 2, 7- to 9-year-olds preserved the spelling of /z/ in pseudoword base forms when writing ostensibly related inflected and derived forms (e.g., kaise-kaisy). In both studies, the children’s tendency to preserve the spelling of /z/ between base and inflected/derived words was related to their performance on analogy tasks of morphological awareness. These findings add to the growing body of evidence that children recognise and represent links of meaning between words from relatively early in their writing experience, and that morphological awareness facilitates the spelling of morphologically complex words.     

Orthographic knowledge predicts reading and spelling skills over and above general intelligence and phonological awareness

It is widely accepted that general intelligence and phonological awareness contribute to children’s acquisition of reading and spelling skills. A further candidate in this regard is orthographic knowledge (i.e., the knowledge about permissible letter patterns). It consists of two components, word-specific (i.e., the knowledge of the spelling of specific words) and general orthographic knowledge (i.e., the knowledge about legal letter patterns of a writing system). Among German students, previous studies have shown that word-specific orthographic knowledge contributes to both reading and spelling. The results regarding general orthographic knowledge and its contribution to reading and spelling are inconsistent. The major goal of the present study was to determine the incremental predictive value of orthographic knowledge for reading and spelling skills among German elementary-school children (N = 66), over and above the contribution of general intelligence and phonological awareness. The second goal was to examine whether there is a difference between the two subtypes of orthographic knowledge in the amount of their respective contribution to reading and spelling performance. The results show that word-specific as well as general orthographic knowledge contribute to both reading and spelling performance, over and above intelligence and phonological awareness. Furthermore, it reveals that both word-specific and general orthographic knowledge explain more variance of spelling compared to reading. Possible explanations for these results, limitations, and implications of the study are being discussed.

     

Pathways to literacy: a study of invented spelling and its role in learning to read

This intervention study tested whether invented spelling plays a causal role in learning to read. Three groups of kindergarten children (mean age = 5 years 7 months) participated in a 4-week intervention. Children in the invented-spelling group spelled words as best they could and received developmentally appropriate feedback. Children in the 2 comparison groups were trained in phonological awareness or drew pictures. Invented-spelling training benefited phonological and orthographic awareness and reading of words used in the intervention. Importantly, the invented-spelling group learned to read more words in a learn-to-read task than the other groups. The finding are in accord with the view that invented spelling coupled with feedback encourages an analytical approach and facilitates the integration of phonological and orthographic knowledge, hence facilitating the acquisition of reading.     

The impact of visual-spatial attention on reading and spelling in Chinese children

The present study investigated the associations of visual-spatial attention with word reading fluency and spelling in 92 third grade Hong Kong Chinese children. Word reading fluency was measured with a timed reading task whereas spelling was measured with a dictation task. Results showed that visual-spatial attention was a unique predictor of speeded reading accuracy (i.e., the total number of words read correctly divided by the total number of words read in a timed reading task) but not reading speed (i.e., the number of words read correctly in the same task) after controlling for age, non-verbal intelligence, morphological awareness, phonological awareness, orthographic knowledge, and rapid automatized naming. Visual-spatial attention also explained unique variance in word spelling measured with a dictation task after the same control variables. The findings of the present study suggest that visual-spatial attention is important for literacy development in Chinese children.     

The role of stroke knowledge in reading and spelling in Chinese

The present study examined the types of orthographic knowledge that are important in learning to read and spell Chinese words in a 2‐year longitudinal study following 289 Hong Kong Chinese children from Grade 1 to Grade 2. Multiple regression results showed that radical knowledge significantly predicted children's word reading and spelling performance across the years. Stroke knowledge contributed both concurrently (Grade 1) and longitudinally (Grade 2) to children's spelling performance after controlling for rapid naming, phonological awareness, morphological awareness and radical knowledge. These findings support the significance of radical knowledge in Chinese reading and spelling and the specific role of stroke order knowledge in Chinese spelling. The findings have implications for the design of an effective curriculum for teaching children to spell Chinese characters.     

Spelling development in deaf and hearing children: Evidence for use of morpho-phonological regularities in French

This study investigated the processes that deaf school children use for spelling. Hearing and deaf spellers of two age groups spelled three types of words differing in orthographic transparency (Regular, Morphological and Opaque words). In all groups, words that could be spelled on the basis of phoneme-grapheme knowledge (Regular words) were easier than words that could be spelled only on the basis of lexical orthographic information (Opaque words). Words in which spelling can be derived from morphological information were easier than Opaque words for older deaf and hearing subjects but not for younger subjects. In deaf children, use of phoneme-grapheme knowledge seems to develop with age, but only in those individuals who had intelligible speech. The presence of systematic misspellings indicates that the hearing-impaired youngsters rely upon inaccurate speech representations they derived mainly form lip-reading. The findings thus suggest that deaf subjects's spelling is based on an exploitation of the linguistic regularities represented in the French alphabetic orthography, but that this exploitation is limited by the vagueness of their representations of oral language. These findings are discussed in the light of current developmental models of spelling acquisition.     

Spelling difficulties in Spanish-speaking children with dyslexia / Dificultades de escritura en niños españoles con dislexia

In addition to reading difficulties, a significant proportion of developmental dyslexics have spelling problems, which persist into adulthood. Studies carried out in languages with opaque orthographies have found that dyslexics frequently make phonological substitutions when spelling and have difficulties in developing orthographic representations of irregular words. Those errors seem to derive from an excessive use of phonological codes when writing. Minimal research in Spanish (relatively transparent orthography) about the relationship between dyslexia and spelling difficulties has been carried out to date. In this study, 19 Spanish-speaking developmental dyslexics (from 7 to 11 years old) and 28 controls (from 6 to 11 years old, distributed in two groups, one matched for age and the other for reading level with the dyslexics) performed a dictation task of 80 stimuli with different levels of orthographic consistency, in order to discover the codes they use in the writing process. Results showed that Spanish children with dyslexia made significantly more spelling errors, especially among the ruled and irregular words. These findings are consistent with the idea that these children have difficulties in developing orthographic representations and use phonological codes more frequently than non-dyslexics, resulting in phonologically plausible errors when writing irregular words. These results have important implications for the treatment of spelling difficulties in children with dyslexia, highlighting the need to focus on the correct acquisition of grapheme-phoneme conversion rules as well as the development of appropriate orthographic representations.     

Manipulating Written Hebrew Roots Across Development: The Interface of Semantic,Phonological and Orthographic Factors

The study examined children and adolescents’ ability to improve root spelling in Hebrew words by paying attention to phonological, semantic and orthographic properties of priming roots. One hundred and fifty 8, 9, 10, 11 and 15-year olds were administered two spelling tests in Hebrew. The same 40 target words were used in both tests, each word containing a root with at least one homophonous letter. Target words were matched one-to-one with 40 priming words containing the same root. The pool of prime-target word pairs was classified into two major groups:Words containing genuine root primes, and words containing false root primes. In the first test, participants had to spell the 40 target words. In the second test they had to spell the same words, each primed by its written genuine or false match. Results showed that unprimed spelling improved with age. Priming – both genuine and false – improved spelling performance significantly, especially in younger grades, but genuine priming was more effective. Spellers were able to overcome phonological opacity in root primes and to take root semantics into account. This finding testifies to the robustness of the root as a unified morphological entity in Hebrew and to children’s ability to make use of their knowledge of lexical and morphological organization in learning to spell.We thank Dominiek Sandra, Harald Baayen and an anonymous reviewer for their important and constructive comments on an earlier version of this paper.