Background: The role of morphological awareness for literacy development is non-controversial, but it is likely to depend on the characteristics of a specific orthography. Previous studies analysing the role of morphological awareness are mainly based on English samples; thus, it is unclear how generalisable these results are. In the current…

We investigated how letter length, phoneme length, and consonant clusters contribute to the word length effect in 2nd- and 4th-grade children. They read words from three different conditions: In one condition, letter length increased but phoneme length did not due to multiletter graphemes (H"aus"-B"auch"-S"chach"). In…

In an effort to improve oral reading, beginning and remedial reading programs in English focus on phonological awareness skills and recoding with grapheme--phoneme correspondences. The meanings of the words children practice reading aloud are given little emphasis. Some studies now suggest semantic knowledge may have a direct effect on children's…

Background: A large amount of evidence highlights the obvious inequalities in literacy results of South African learners. Despite this, a sound understanding of how learners approach the task of reading in the African languages is lacking. Aim: This article examines the role of the syllable, phoneme and morpheme in reading in transparent,…

Developing readers of English appear to favor phonograms over grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) to read unknown words. For polysyllabic polymorphemic (PSPM) words, the morphophonemic nature of English means elementary-age children may focus on roots and affixes. Does developing readers' PSPM word reading accuracy relate to the morphological…

This study aimed to investigate the structure and the validity of the cognitive components of reading in Thai, which is a language with a high degree of grapheme-phoneme correspondence. The participants were 1181 fourth-grade students in 29 schools in Thailand, divided into two subsamples for data analysis. Phoneme isolation, rapid colour naming,…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the use of linguistic knowledge in spelling by analyzing spelling errors made by 220 students in the fourth, fifth, and seventh grades. A 25-word researcher-designed spelling test with considerations of word frequency, word familiarity, and word type (based on morphological complexity) was administered.…

A sample of 141 Canadian children in grades 3 through 6 wrote to dictation 24 short sentences sampling 90 lexical items representing 10 inflectional morphological categories to study their relation to the written spelling of 40 sight words. The children were encouraged in 3, 30-minute teaching sessions to use multiple strategies of retrieval,…

This study examined the importance of morphological awareness in Korean-English biliteracy acquisition. English is an opaque orthographic system, in which letters and sounds have indirect correspondences. Korean Hangul, on the other hand, is a transparent orthographic system where there are direct letter-sound correspondences. Sixty-five children…

The goal of the current research was to assess whether children can make strategic use of morphological relations among words to spell. French-speaking children in Grade 4 spelled three word types: (a) phonological words that had regular phoneme-grapheme correspondences, (b) morphological words that had silent consonant endings for which a…