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

By Nenagh Kemp. 2006

93 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Education

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b2c94da6f0c100323fea38ddad472c1709eba517

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In Developmental and Educational Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

Morphological processing in reading acquisition: A cross-linguistic perspective (2011, unknown): “…morphology as was evidenced from relationships of morphological knowledge with word decoding (Leong, 2000; Singson, Mahony, & Mann, 2000), spelling (Kemp, 2006), reading vocabulary (Nagy & Scott, 2000), and reading comprehension (Carlisle, 2000; Nagy, Berninger, Abbott, Vaughan, & Vermeulen, 2004).”
Children’s morphological awareness and reading ability (2012, methodology): “Items were modeled on those used by Nunes et al. (1997a, b) and Kemp (2006) and are given in the Appendix.”
A statistical learning perspective on children's learning about graphotactic and morphological regularities in spelling. (2008, background): “and Kemp’s (2006) study of spelling of the word-medial /z/ sound”
Beyond Phonics: The Case for Teaching Children the Logic of the English Spelling System (2017, unknown): “For example, untaught morphological awareness explains unique variance for reading (Carlisle, 2000; Deacon & Kirby, 2004), vocabulary learning (Nagy, Berninger, & Abbot, 2006; Stahl & Nagy, 2006), and spelling (Deacon & Bryant, 2006a, 2006b; Kemp, 2006; Perry, Ziegler, & Coltheart, 2002).”
Metalinguistic contributions to reading and spelling in second and third grade students (2012, background): “Morphological awareness tasks typically tap into either the semantic (e.g., ‘‘Does moth come from mother?’’; Kemp, 2006 ) or the semantic and syntactic (e.g., ‘‘friend.”