Morphological priming development in Brazilian Portuguese-speaking children

Abstract

Many studies have shown that, while reading, the brain works a sort of decomposing process of words, reducing them to its morphemes. Moreover, many studies have shown that morphological awareness, which is the ability to reflect upon the structure of words, may contribute to reading in Brazilian Portuguese. The present study investigated morphological priming in children and evaluated the correlation between morphological priming and morphological awareness scores. One hundred and forty-one children took part in this research: 35 second graders, 33 third graders, 33 fourth graders, and 40 fifth graders. They performed a lexical decision task (LDT) and morphological awareness task. Results indicate that as early as the second grade, children show some degree of morphological priming effects. In addition, children from the fifth grade presented morphological priming effects similar to those of a skilled reader. No correlations between morphological awareness scores and morphological priming effects were found.

The Relations of Morphological Awareness with Language and Literacy Skills Vary Depending on Orthographic Depth and Nature of Morphological Awareness

“…Fourth, studies measured morphological awareness and one or more of the following skills: phonological awareness, orthographic awareness, vocabulary, word reading, spelling, text reading fluency, and reading comprehension. Studies that were not written in English (e.g., Blondet & Guiraud, 2017; da Mota, 2012), that did not measure either morphological awareness or one of the other skills mentioned above (e.g., Miller et al, 2016; Schiff & Raveh, 2006; Varma et al, 1985), and of which the measures had not assessed morphological awareness per se (e.g., morpho-syntax that confounds morphological awareness with syntactic awareness; Hu, 2010; de Oliveira et al, 2017; Reese, 2009) were excluded in the screening process.…”

Can a lexical decision task predict efficiency in the judgment of ambiguous sentences?

“…Additionally, the difference can be explained by the fact that we used only 216 words in our study, and Oliveira used more than twice that amount. Other studies used similar paradigms in the lexical decision task (Araújo et al, 2015;Oliveira & Justi, 2017), and studies with adults found a similar percentage (95%) and a similar reaction time (917 ms, S.D. = 164).…”

“…In addition, this task has been extensively used and validated in previous research (see Araújo et al, 2015;Haro et al, 2017;Hicks et al, 2017;or Oliveira, 2014;Oliveira & Justi, 2017 for studies using lexical decision tasks in Portuguese). In the lexical decision task, the correct percentages of regular words and quasi-words were higher than those found by Oliveira (2014), who reported correct percentages of 89.16% (S.D.…”

“…The use of this task has been increasing and has been used to understand priming (Oliveira & Justi, 2017), event-related potentials (Araújo et al, 2015;Haro et al, 2017), memory (Hicks et al, 2017), and several other phenomena.…”

O processamento morfológico no português brasileiro em estudantes do ensino

“…Com relação ao conhecimento implícito de morfemas, o processamento morfológico, poucos estudos nacionais foram encontrados até o momento (Oliveira & Justi, 2017;Paula, 2007). O processamento morfológico diz respeito a como as palavras são armazenadas e acessadas durante o reconhecimento visual das mesmas (Estivalet, 2016).…”