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…

According to Hypothesis (H) theory, learning should be very difficult when the number of Hs the subject samples from is very large and/or the correct H is not available. These assumptions were tested with third- and fourth-grade children. In general, results supported these assumptions. (Author/MP)