Longitudinal effects of different aspects of morphological awareness skills on early spelling development
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Longitudinal effects of different aspects of morphological awareness skills on early spelling development Ioannis Grigorakis1 · George Manolitsis1 Accepted: 12 October 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract The purpose of this 3-year longitudinal study was to examine the role of three morphological awareness (MA) aspects (inflectional, derivational, and lexical compounding) in the spelling of specific morphemes. Two hundred and fifteen Greek children were followed from kindergarten (K) to grade 2 (G2). In K and grade 1 (G1) they were tested on measures of morphological awareness, letter knowledge, phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, and general cognitive ability. At the end of G1 and G2, they were also tested on spelling of (a) inflectional suffixes in words and pseudowords, (b) familiar stems in simple words, and (c) familiar simple stems in low frequency derived words and in pseudowords with existing derived morphemes. The results of hierarchical regression analyses showed that the derivational aspect of MA in K and the lexical compounding aspect of MA in G1 predicted uniquely the spelling of inflectional suffixes in both words and pseudowords in G1 and G2 respectively. In addition, the lexical compounding aspect of MA in K and G1 predicted the spelling of familiar stems in simple words and the spelling of familiar simple stems in low frequency derived words in G1 and G2 respectively. Inflectional aspect of MA did not predict later performance in any spelling measure. These findings speak to the importance of early MA skills in spelling of specific morphemes and provide supportive evidence to those who suggest that morphological knowledge is part of children’s repertoire of strategies employed in spelling, even at the first stages of learning to spell. Keywords Morphological awareness · Inflection · Derivation · Compounding · Morpheme spelling · Greek
* Ioannis Grigorakis [email protected] 1
Department of Preschool Education, University of Crete, 74100 Rethymno, Crete, Greece
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I. Grigorakis, G. Manolitsis
Introduction Spelling of words is sensitive to constraints set by morphological rules in alphabetic orthographies (Treiman & Kessler, 2005) and children seem to include word’s morphological features even at their first spelling attempts (Treiman, Cassar, & Zukowski, 1994). A number of theoretical views of spelling development highlighted the prominent role of children’s knowledge of morphemes (e.g., Apel, Masterson, & Hart, 2004; Ehri, 2017; Frith, 1985; Treiman, 2017). Based on these facts, it is reasonable to expect that children’s ability to reflect on and manipulate the morphemic structure of words and knowledge about the word formation rules, named morphological awareness (MA) (Carlisle, 1995; Kuo & Anderson, 2006), would contribute to spelling development. Although several studies have shown that MA is an important predictor either of the general word spelling (Deacon, Kirby, & Casselman-Bell, 2009; Diamanti et al., 2017) or of the accurate spellin
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