Inaudible syntactic markers are especially difficult to spell. This paper examines how 455 fourth graders spell silent French plural markers in a dictation with real and pseudowords after one year of formal French instruction (L2). The Generalized Linear Mixed Model analysis shows first that noun plural spelling (real and pseudo) is a strong…

Morphological knowledge plays an essential role in the acquisition of literacy skills and has therefore gained increasing attention in studies involving populations with literacy deficits, such as students from low socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds. Previous studies have shown that fully developed morphological representations are abstract…

This study investigated how word and child characteristics affect children's ability to learn the meanings of novel words. Participants were fourth- and fifth-graders representing native English speakers (NE) and bilingual learners with fluent English proficiency (FEP) and designated English Learners (EL). Students were taught the meanings of a…

What determines consonant doubling in English? This question is pursued by using a large lexical database to establish systematic correlations between spelling, phonology and morphology. The main insights are: Consonant doubling is most regular at morpheme boundaries. It can be described in graphemic terms alone, i.e. without reference to…

This study examined the associations of three levels of meaning acquisition, i.e., whole word (vocabulary), morpheme (morphological awareness), and semantic radical (orthography-semantic awareness) to early Chinese reading comprehension among 164 Hong Kong Chinese primary school students, ages 7 and 8 years old, across 1 year. With time 1 word…

This study investigated the nature of morphological awareness and its relation to learning to read Chinese characters among 46 Chinese-speaking preschool children. The children took a morphological awareness task, which varied in semantic transparency and morpheme position. Children's vocabulary knowledge and extant character reading ability were…

In written French, the acquisition of the nominal plural ("-s") occurs earlier and faster than the acquisition of the verbal plural ("-nt") (Totereau, Thevenin & Fayol, 1997, "Learning to Spell"). The reasons for this difference are not well known. The objective of the present research is to test two alternative hypotheses, which may provide an…

Morphology is one of the organizing principles of the mental lexicon. It is especially important in Hebrew, where word structure expresses a rich array of semantic notions. This study investigated the ability of Hebrew-speaking children to solve written morphological analogies by reading and completing two sets of real and invented root- and…