Children's Implicit Learning of Graphotactic and Morphological Regularities (original) (raw)
Related papers
How Children Learn About Morphological Spelling Rules
Child Development, 2007
A 2-year longitudinal study was carried out to test the hypothesis that children's word-specific learning of inflectional spellings is an essential first step in their acquiring an understanding of morphological rules for spelling inflections. Ninety children, who were 6-years-old at the start of the project, were asked to spell pseudowords and real words on three separate occasions. Inflections in pseudowords can be spelled only on the basis of morphological spelling rules, whereas the same inflections in real words can be spelled either through familiarity with the specific words (word-specific knowledge) or through morphological rules. Cross-lagged correlations suggested that the children's initial word-specific learning may be the basis for their later adoption and use of morphological spelling rules.
Applied Psycholinguistics
The English spelling system has a variety of rules and exceptions, but both theoretical and empirical accounts have generally concluded that by about age 9 or 10, children master the morphological rule that regular plural nouns (e.g., socks) and third-person singular present verbs (e.g., lacks) are spelled with the inflectional ending –s. In three experiments, however, we found that when forced to rely exclusively on morphological cues, only a minority of primary school children, secondary school children, and even adults performed significantly above chance at choosing the appropriate spelling for novel words presented as inflected or uninflected nouns and verbs. Further, significantly above-chance performance was more common in adults who had attended school until age 18, compared to age 16. We conclude that many spellers, especially those who do not go on to tertiary education, never learn some simple morphological spelling rules, and instead rely on a store of individual word-sp...
Young children's knowledge of morphological and phonological rules
Journal of Communication Disorders, 1971
Twenty preschool children were given tests ot their implicit knowledge oi morphoiogicnl and phon*rlopical rule:i. Scores on the two tests were not correlated, ;md .;ubjects with differing knowledge of phonological rules did not differ significantly in art~c~lalory proficiency. Children's responses and test behavior are described and discussed.
Morphological spelling strategies: Developmental stages and processes
Developmental Psychology, 1997
The spelling of many words in English and in other orthographies involves patterns determined by morphology (e.g., ed in past regular verbs). The authors report a longitudinal study that shows that when children first adopt such spelling patterns, they do so with little regard for their morphological basis. They generalize the patterns to grammatically inappropriate words (e.g., sofed for soft). Later these generalizations are confined to the right grammatical category (e.g., keped for kept) and finally to the right group of words (regular verbs). The authors conclude that children first see these spelling patterns merely as exceptions to the phonetic system and later grasp their grammatical significance. The study included two new measures of grammatical awareness, both involving analogies, that predicted success with spelling inflectional morphemes in later sessions.
Children benefit from morphological relatedness when they learn to spell new words
Frontiers in Psychology, 2013
Use of morphologically related words often helps in selecting among spellings of sounds in French. For instance, final /wa/ 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. We asked whether 8-year-old children benefited from such cues to learn new spellings. Children read silently 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 vensois 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 vensoisist plays the vensois instrument, which justifies that vensois includes a final silent s). 30 min after having read the stories, children's orthographic learning was assessed by asking them to choose the correct spelling of each nonword from among three phonologically plausible alternatives (e.g., vensois, vensoit, vensoie). Children chose correct spellings more often in the morphological condition than the opaque condition, even though the root (vensois) had been presented equally often in both conditions. That is, children benefited from information about the spelling of the morphologically complex word to learn the spelling of the stem.
Learning a novel grapheme: Effects of positional and phonemic context on children's spelling
2001
Two experiments explored how children who encounter a new spelling for a phoneme generalize it to novel items. Children ages 5 1/2 to 9 (N = 123) were taught a CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) nonword containing a new vowel spelling in the middle position (e.g., /gak/ is spelled as giik). They were then asked to spell other nonwords containing the vowel or to judge spellings that had supposedly been produced by younger children. Children were sensitive to position in the spelling production task, being more likely to use the novel grapheme when the vowel appeared in the middle of a CVC target than when it appeared in word-initial or word-final position. Children were not significantly more likely to use the novel grapheme when the target shared the vowel and final consonant (rime) of the training stimulus than when it shared the initial consonant and vowel. Implications for views of spelling development are discussed.
How does graphotactic knowledge influence children's learning of new spellings?
Frontiers in Psychology, 2013
Two experiments investigated whether and how the learning of spellings by French third graders is influenced by two graphotactic patterns: consonants cannot double in word-initial position (Experiment 1) and consonants cannot double after single consonants (Experiment 2). Children silently read meaningful texts that contained three types of novel spellings: no doublet (e.g., mupile, guprane), doublet in a legal position (e.g., muppile, gupprane), and doublet in an illegal position (e.g., mmupile, guprrane). Orthographic learning was assessed with a task of spelling to dictation. In both experiments, children recalled items without doublets better than items with doublets. In Experiment 1, children recalled spellings with a doublet in illegal word-initial position better than spellings with a doublet in legal word-medial position, and almost all misspellings involved the omission of the doublet. The fact that the graphotactic violation in an item like mmupile was in the salient initial position may explain why children often remembered both the presence and the position of the doublet. In Experiment 2, children recalled non-words with a doublet before a single consonant (legal, e.g., gupprane) better than those with a doublet after a single consonant (illegal, e.g., guprrane). Omission of the doublet was the most frequent error for both types of items. Children also made some transposition errors on items with a doublet after a single consonant, recalling for example gupprane instead of guprrane. These results suggest that, when a doublet is in the hard-to-remember medial position, children sometimes remember that an item contains a doublet but not which letter is doubled. Their knowledge that double consonants can occur before but not after single consonants leads to transposition errors on items like guprrane. These results shed new light on the conditions under which children use general knowledge about the graphotactic patterns of their writing system to reconstruct spellings.
Implicit phonology in children
Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 1967
Children whose average age was three 3 yrs. 7 mos, were presented with pairs of words: one of each pair was a non-English word which is possible in English according to the Whorfian formula for the production of English monosyllables, and the second was not possible in English according to the sequence constraints of the same formula. Some of the words deviated from English only in their initial consonant cluster, while others deviated both in initial and final clusters. The Ss were asked to say which one of the pair sounded more like a word. They showed discrimination by choosing more "possible" words than "impossible" words, and mispronounced the latter more often than the former. Substitutions of phonemes in eases of these mispronunciations were minimally distant from the original in terms of the number of distinctive feature changes. The evidence favors the proposition that the child has internalized the implicit syntax of phonemes and that a perceptual disposition has been achieved which leads him to mispronounce the "impossible" words.
The influence of spelling rules on phonology
2000
The influence of spelling conventions on phonological knowledge was investigated. In Experiment 1 five-year old preliterate children and eight-year-old literate children were compared on their intuitive syllabification (word fragmentation) of disyllabic Dutch words with a single intervocalic consonant (e.g. /åp\l/, 'apple'). The larger number of ambisyllabic responses in the older age group could either be a reflection of the eight-year-olds' more mature phonology or an interaction between phonological knowledge and spelling conventions. Experiments 2 and 3, using literate and illiterate adults respectively, were designed to disentangle these alternative accounts.
In support of phonological bias in implicit learning
to appear in LLD, 2020
This paper explores the hypothesis that children pay more attention to phonological cues than semantic cues when acquiring grammatical patterns. In a series of artificial allomorphy learning experiments with adults and children we find support for this hypothesis but only for those learners who do not show clear signs of explicit learning. In particular, learners who cannot verbalize a correct rule after the experiment, nevertheless perform above chance on phonological patterns, but not the semantic ones. On the other hand, learners, particularly adults, are more likely to (explicitly) discover and successfully verbalize a rule based on a salient feature of animacy compared to a phonological feature based on the number of syllables. We discuss implications of these results in the context of a distinction between explicit and implicit learning mechanisms and how this distinction relates to the study of phonological bias.