This study assessed the morphological knowledge of kindergarteners and first graders in relation to their early writing ability. Morphological knowledge was investigated because, in order to write, children need to understand that words are composed of morphemes and phonemes, and because poor writers have particular difficulty with inflected forms of words. Kindergarteners and first graders were grouped by their implicit understanding of morphology and were given tests of dictated spelling and morphological analysis. First graders with poor implicit morphological knowledge omitted more inflectional morphemes in writing and were less able to identify base morphemes in spoken words than kindergarteners and first graders with higher levels of implicit morphological knowledge. The results demonstrate the importance of morphological knowledge in the development of written language proficiency.

The purpose of this study was to investigate morphological knowledge in spoken language and its relationship to written representation of morphemes by normally achieving second graders, language-learning disabled children, and adults with literacy problems. Research dealing with the written expression of populations with language-learning difficulties has consistently indicated that these populations tend to make morphemic errors when spelling words. If a deficit in morphological knowledge is an underlying factor, then these individuals might also be expected to perform poorly on tasks that require them to apply morphological rules in spoken language (an implicit level of morphological knowledge) or to analyze the morphemic structure of spoken words (an explicit level of morphological knowledge). Analyses found both these levels of morphological knowledge to be highly related to morpheme use in written language samples, and suggest that morphological knowledge does not develop solely as a function of maturation or exposure to language. Implications of these findings for assessment and intervention are addressed.

This study examined the ability of children in French immersion and English programs to analyze the internal structure of spoken words in relation to their early reading and spelling abilities in English. Thirty-two children in the first grade were given a modified version of the Auditory Analysis Test, and reading and spelling tasks that included both real words and non-words. Results indicated that French immersion children were more proficient than their English program peers at explicitly analyzing spoken words and that the groups did not differ when reading and spelling orthographically regular real words and non-words. The English program children performed better than their French program peers only when reading orthographically irregular English words. These results demonstrate that second language learning enhances metalinguistic awareness and help to explain why children in immersion programs do not experience long-term difficulty in acquiring English written language skills.

Our initial study compared 15 normally- developing and 13 language- delayed four- and- five- year- olds on a range of phoneme awareness tasks differing in the degree of explicit linguistic analysis required. The language- delayed group performed more poorly than the normally- developing children, and there were significant group differences on several tasks. A significant interaction effect reflected the particular difficulty the language- delayed group had with the more explicit tasks. Follow- up testing suggests that group differences are maintained over time and that the language- delayed children perform more poorly than the normally- developing children on tests of decoding and spelling at the end of first grade.An intervention study, training phoneme awareness skills in language-delayed kindergarten children, was undertaken with a new group of subjects. Fourteen language- delayed children participated in 16 training sessions over eight weeks. Fourteen normal and 14 language- delayed children served as controls. Only the language- delayed training group made significant gains from pre- to posttraining measures. Following training, the language-delayed training group performed similarly to normal controls and significantly better than language- delayed controls whom they had matched before intervention. One year later, the language-delayed children who received training maintained their gains on phoneme analysis tasks and performed significantly better than the language-delayed controls on reading measures. Educational implications are discussed.