Morphological Effects on Orthographic Learning in Monolingual English-Speaking and Bilingual Chinese-English-Speaking Children

ABSTRACT

Morphological knowledge is known to be positively associated with reading ability. However, whether morphological knowledge affects children’s learning of new orthographic representations is less clear.

Purpose

This study aimed to investigate morphological effects on orthographic learning in English, and whether this effect, if any, is different for monolingual compared to Chinese-English-speaking bilingual children, who often have difficulty acquiring English inflectional morphology.

Method

59 Year 2 children, including 29 English-speaking monolinguals and 30 Chinese-English-speaking bilinguals participated. We assessed children’s preexisting English inflectional morphological knowledge. The children learned twelve novel words that were either presented with morphological variation (e.g., vack, vacks, vacking, vacked) or pure repetition (e.g., vack x 4). Orthographic learning was measured by orthographic choice and spelling tasks.

Results

1) orthographic learning from the spelling task showed better performance in the repetition condition, 2) there were no differences in orthographic learning between the monolinguals and bilinguals, despite the fact that the monolinguals had better inflectional morphological knowledge than the bilinguals.

Conclusion

Children learned novel written words better when they are presented without morphological variation, supporting the item-based feature of the self-teaching hypothesis. Chinese-English-speaking bilinguals’ weaker English morphological knowledge does not seem to hinder their orthographic learning ability.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2023.2217965

Notes

1. Inflectional suffixes carry rich syntactic information such as word class, tense, and some semantic information. The semantic information that inflectional affixes contain can sometimes surpass typical expectations of word classes (e.g., a verb indicates an action vs. a noun indicates an object), or tense (e.g., an action happening in the present vs. being in the past). For example, the word “dress” can be either a verb or a noun, each with quite different meanings.

2. Cognate words share the same origin and are linguistically similar (e.g., “universe” in English, “univers” in French).

3. Two versions of pronunciations were given to the target nonword guve,:/gu:v/and/gʌv/. The former conforms to the GPC rules, but it occurred only in 33% of the real words in CPWD, while the latter occurred in more than 50% of the words.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a grant from the Australian Research Council [grant number DP200100311] to the last author.