Abstract
The study reported here examined grade 2–4 children’s sensitivity to the consistency in the spelling of roots in related words. We build on earlier research by attempting to quantify the extent that children’s spellings of both inflected and derived forms accord with this principle. We contrasted children’s accuracy and consistency in spelling the root form (e.g., rock) with that of its spelling in related inflected and derived forms (e.g., rocks and rocky), as well as unrelated control forms (e.g., rocket). Across grades 2–4, children’s spellings accorded with the root consistency principle to the same extent for inflected and derived forms. Nevertheless, it was not until grade 4 that spellings maximally reflected the principle. These results are discussed in terms of how children’s spelling might come to reflect the root consistency principle that guides spelling in English.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
If the word included a consonant doublet (as in winner), we accepted spellings of the root with and without a doublet as correct. We did so for all items within the quadruple set to ensure that appreciation of orthographic regularities did not influence results (as in Deacon, 2008).
Analyses by items, conducted with an analysis of variance with Grade as the within-subjects variable and Word Type as the within-subjects factor, revealed a main effect of Grade (F2 (2, 56) = 141.93, p < 0.001). Post-hoc tests revealed that grade 3 scored significantly higher than grade 2 and than that grade 4 scored significantly higher than grade 3. There was also a strong trend towards a main effect of Word Type (F2 (3, 28) = 2.19, p = 0.11) that did not interact with Grade (F2 (6, 56) = 0.66, p = 0.68). Analyses of the main effect of Word Type showed that scores were significantly higher in the base condition than in the control condition (p < 0.01). There were trends for scores to be higher for the inflected and derived conditions (p = 0.09 and p = 0.16, respectively) than for the control condition. There was a similar tendency, that did not approach significance, for the scores to be higher for the base than for the inflected and derived conditions (p = 0.47 and p = 0.45, respectively). There was no tendency towards a difference between the inflected and derived conditions (p = 0.90). It is not surprising that these analyses did not always achieve significance, given that the analyses by items had substantially lower power than the analyses by participants.
Analyses by items revealed a main effect of Grade (F2 (2, 42) = 74.88, p < 0.001), with post-hoc tests showing that grade 3 scored significantly higher than grade 2 and grade 4 performed significantly higher than grade 3. There was also a main effect of Word Type (F2 (2, 21) = 4.79, p = 0.02) that did not interact with Grade (F2 (4, 42) = 0.63, p = 0.60). Post-hoc Tukey analyses of the Word Type effect showed that scores were higher for the inflected and derived conditions than for the control condition.
References
Bowers, P., Kirby, J. R., & Deacon, S. H. (2009). Effects of instruction in morphology on reading. Paper accepted for presentation at the meeting of the European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction, Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Carlisle, J. F. (1988). Knowledge of derivational morphology and spelling ability in fourth, sixth and eight grades. Applied Psycholinguistics, 9, 247–266.
Carlisle, J. F. (1996). An exploratory study of morphological errors in children’s written stories. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 8, 61–72.
Deacon, S. H. (2008). The metric matters: Determining the extent of children’s knowledge of morphological spelling regularities. Developmental Science, 11, 396–406.
Deacon, S. H., & Bryant, P. (2005). What children do and do not know about the spelling of inflections and derivations. Developmental Science, 8, 583–594.
Deacon, S. H., & Bryant, P. (2006). Getting to the root: Young writers’ sensitivity to the role of root morphemes in the spelling of inflected and derived words. Journal of Child Language, 33, 401–417.
Deacon, S. H., Conrad, N., & Pacton, S. (2008). A statistical learning perspective on children’s learning about graphotactic and morphological regularities in spelling. Canadian Psychology, 49, 118–124.
Derwing, B. L., Smith, M. L., & Wiebe, G. E. (1995). On the role of spelling in morpheme recognition: Experimental studies with children and adults. In L. B. Feldman (Ed.), Morphological aspects of language processing (pp. 3–27). Hillsdale, NJ: LEA.
Ehri, L. (2005). Learning to read words: Theories, findings and issues. Scientific Studies of Reading, 9, 167–188.
Flavell, J. H., Flavell, E. R., & Green, F. L. (2001). Developmental changes in children’s understanding of the similarity between photographs and their referents. Psychological Science, 12, 430–432.
Frith, U. (1985). Beneath the surface of developmental dyslexia. In K. Patterson, M. Coltheart, & J. Marshall (Eds.), Surface dyslexia (pp. 301–330). London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Green, L., McCutchen, D., Schwiebert, C., Quinlan, T., Eva-Wood, A., & Juelis, J. (2003). Morphological development in children’s writing. Journal of Educational Psychology, 95, 752–761.
Holmes, V. M., & Babauta, M. L. (2005). Single or dual representations for reading and spelling? Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 18, 257–280.
Kemp, N. (2006). Children’s spelling of base, inflected, and derived words: Links with morphological awareness. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 19, 737–765.
Nagy, W. E., & Anderson, R. (1984). The number of words in printed school English. Reading Research Quarterly, 19, 304–330.
Nunes, T., Bryant, P., & Bindman, M. (1997). Morphological spelling strategies: Developmental stages and processes. Developmental Psychology, 33, 637–649.
Pacton, S., & Deacon, S. H. (2008). The timing and mechanisms of children’s use of morphological information in spelling: A review of evidence from French and English. Cognitive Development, 23, 339–359.
Plaut, D. C., McClelland, J. L., Seidenberg, M. S., & Patterson, K. (1996). Understanding normal and impaired word reading: Computational principles in quasi-regular domains. Psychological Review, 103, 56–115.
Pollo, T. C., Treiman, R., & Kessler, B. (2007). Three perspectives on spelling development. In E. J. Grigorenko & A. Naples (Eds.), Single-word reading: Cognitive, behavioral, and biological perspectives. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Read, C. (1986). Children’s creative spelling. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Reed, D. K. (2008). A synthesis of morphology interventions and effects on reading outcomes for students in grades K-12. Learning Disabilities Research & Practice, 23(3), 6–49.
Rubin, H. (1988). Morphological knowledge and early writing ability. Language and Speech, 31, 337–355.
Sterling, C. M. (1983). Spelling errors in context. British Journal of Psychology, 35, 425–435.
Treiman, R. (1993). Beginning to spell: A study of first-grade children. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Treiman, R., & Cassar, M. (1996). Effects of morphology on children’s spelling of final consonant clusters. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 63, 141–170.
Treiman, R., Cassar, M., & Zukowski, A. (1994). What types of linguistic information do children use in spelling? The case of flaps. Child Development, 65, 1318–1337.
Uttal, D. H., Gentner, D., Liu, L. L., & Lewis, A. R. (2008). Developmental changes in children’s understanding of the similarity between photographs and their referents. Developmental Science, 11, 156–170.
Zeno, S. M., Ivens, S. H., Millard, R. T., & Duvvuri, R. (1995). The educator’s word frequency guide. New York: Touchstone Applied Science Associates.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Deacon, S.H., Dhooge, S. Developmental stability and changes in the impact of root consistency on children’s spelling. Read Writ 23, 1055–1069 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-009-9195-5
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-009-9195-5