When children start to learn to read English, they benefit from learning grapheme-phoneme correspondences. As they become more skilled, they use larger graphophonic units and morphemes in word recognition and spelling. We hypothesized that these 2 types of units in decoding make independent contributions to children's reading comprehension and…

Previous research has suggested that children in the early grades of primary school do not have much awareness of morphemes. In this study, a priming paradigm was used to try to detect early signs of morphological representation of stems through a spelling task presented to Portuguese children (N = 805; age range 6-9 years). Primes shared the stem…

Because the spelling of many words in the English language (and in many other languages as well) depends on their morphemic structure, children have to have some knowledge about morphemes in order to learn to read and write. This raises the possibility that children gain much of their explicit knowledge about morphemes as a direct result of…

Looks at the link between children's understanding of a morphemically-based orthographic rule and their awareness of morphemic distinctions. Questions the orthographic rule of using the apostrophe to denote possession in English. Concludes that different forms of linguistic awareness affect different aspects of reading and spelling. (SC)

It is difficult to transform research evidence into teacher practice; indeed it has been argued that educational research is not very useful to teachers. In this paper, we explore teacher knowledge about a relatively new area of research concerning the role morphemes play in spelling, and seek to transform their practice. We find that although…

It is difficult to transform research evidence into teacher practice; indeed it has been argued that educational research is not very useful to teachers. In this paper, we explore teacher knowledge about a relatively new area of research concerning the role morphemes play in spelling, and seek to transform their practice. We find that although…

Conducted a three-year longitudinal analysis of morphological spelling strategies in second through fourth graders. Found that, when children first adopt morphologically determined spelling patterns, they disregard the morphological basis. Generalization progresses from grammatically inappropriate words to the right grammatical category to the…