Purpose: We examined whether affix type and base word transparency explained variation in third- through sixth-grade students' performance on a number of morphological awareness tasks. Method: Third- through sixth-grade students (n > 500 at each grade) completed morphological awareness tasks from the Morphological Awareness Test for Reading and…

Purpose: We examined whether affix type and base word transparency explained variation in third- through sixth-grade students' performance on a number of morphological awareness tasks. Method: Third- through sixth-grade students (n > 500 at each grade) completed morphological awareness tasks from the Morphological Awareness Test for Reading and…

This is the appendix for the report, "The Impact of Word Knowledge Instruction on Literacy Outcomes in Grade 5." District leaders in a large urban school district in central Florida wanted to examine the efficacy of a new curriculum designed to enhance the word knowledge of grade 5 students so as to improve reading achievement. The new…

Understanding text in a second language can be particularly challenging. The authors explored the contribution of morphological awareness in children's first and second languages to development in second-language reading comprehension. Critically, the authors examined the role of a skill that might be at the heart of these cross-linguistic…

This study was designed to examine the developmental course of the suffix frequency effect and its role in the development of automatic morpho-lexical access. In Spanish, a highly transparent language from an orthographic point of view, this effect has been shown to be facilitative in adults, but the evidence with children is still inconclusive. A…

District leaders in a large urban school district in central Florida wanted to examine the efficacy of a new curriculum designed to enhance the word knowledge of grade 5 students so as to improve reading achievement. The new curriculum, called Word Knowledge Instruction (WKI), consists of 15-minute lessons 4 days a week for 20 weeks. The lessons…

Adult Basic Education programs are under pressure to develop and deliver instruction that promotes rapid and sustained literacy development. We describe a novel approach to a literacy intervention that focuses on morphemes, which are the smallest meaningful units contained in words. We argue that if you teach learners that big words are comprised…

Morphological processing by French children was investigated in two experiments. The first showed that second and third graders read pseudowords such as "chat-ure" ("cat-ish") composed of an illegally combined real stem and real derivational suffix faster and more accurately than they read matched pseudowords composed of a pseudostem and a real…

We examined whether French third- and fifth-grade children rely on morphemes when recognizing words and whether this reliance depends on word familiarity. We manipulated the presence of bases and suffixes in words and pseudowords to compare their contribution in a lexical decision task. Both bases and suffixes facilitated word reading accuracy and…

This study examined the effects of lexical frequency on children's production of accurate primary stress in words derived with nonneutral English suffixes. Forty-four third-grade children participated in an elicited derived word task in which they produced high-frequency, low-frequency, and nonsense-derived words with stress-changing suffixes…

Although it is well-established that children with Specific Language Impairment characteristically optionally inflect forms that require tense and agreement marking, their abilities with regards to derivational suffixation are less well understood. In this paper we provide evidence from children with Grammatical-Specific Language Impairment…

Purpose: Little is known about the phonological aspects of derivational processes. Neutral suffixes (e.g., "-ness") that do not change stress and rhythmic or nonneutral suffixes (e.g., "-ity") that alter stem stress were used in a production task that explored developmental changes in phonological accuracy of derived English…

This study examined how French third (36) and fifth (36) graders used the morphosyntactic context when they spell morphologically complex words with homophonous suffixes (/a/). Participants had to spell adverbs (/a/ transcribed ent) and present participles (/a/ transcribed ant), contrasted on the basis of their frequency, in isolation or embedded…