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  • Title: The role of morphology in reading and spelling.
    Author: Sénéchal M, Kearnan K.
    Journal: Adv Child Dev Behav; 2007; 35():297-325. PubMed ID: 17682329.
    Abstract:
    The accumulated evidence that we reviewed suggests that children make use of regularities in the language--be it phonological, orthographic, and morphological--to read and spell words. Given that languages vary in the clarity with which oral language is represented in writing, one should expect the relative roles of phonological, orthographic, and morphological processing to vary accordingly. In this chapter, we focused on the relative contribution of morphological analysis and awareness to reading and spelling. We found that the morphological information in complex words can facilitate reading and spelling and that knowledge about the morphemic structure of a language can assist a child in reading, spelling, and deriving the meaning of multimorphemic words. The accumulated evidence also demonstrates that morphological awareness contributes to individual differences in reading and spelling that cannot be entirely subsumed to orthographic and phonological processing. Intervention studies on morphological knowledge (i.e., analysis and awareness), however, have not yielded the strong effects that one would have expected. We suspect that more successful intervention studies on how morphological knowledge can enhance literacy warrant a more thorough understanding of the complex interplay between morphological knowledge and a number of different variables such as oral vocabulary, phonological and orthographic awareness, and reading exposure. Given the demonstrated facilitative effects that morphological information can have on reading and spelling along with the particular difficulties that multimorphemic words can pose, researchers argue that systematic and sequential instruction of morphology is needed during the elementary years of schooling. Morphological rules, however, are currently not taught or taught partially to elementary school children. Perhaps, as Carlisle suggests, this is partly due to the fact that educators are more familiar with concepts of phonemes and phoneme awareness than with concepts of morphemes and morphemic awareness. This may change in time as we cumulate stronger scientific evidence on the valuable role of morphological knowledge in reading and spelling.
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