Can children's spelling of schwa vowels in stems be improved?

Abstract

Children in the early grades of primary school do not seem to have much awareness of morphemes. In this study, a priming paradigm was used to try to detect early signs of morphological representation of stems through a spelling task presented to Portuguese children (N= 396; age range 6 to 9 years). Primes shared the stem with the targets and contained well-articulated, stressed vowels; the stems of the target words contained non-stressed schwa vowels, which typically result in spelling difficulties. If priming proved effective, the well-articulated vowels in the prime should lead to improvement in the spelling of the schwa vowels in the targets. Primes were presented in two conditions: in only-oral or in oral-plus-written form. Effectiveness of priming was assessed by comparison with a no-priming condition. There was a significant interaction between priming effects and grade. No priming effects were detected in 6- and 7-year-old children; oral-plus-written priming produced higher rates of correct vowel spelling for 8- and 9-year-olds; only-oral priming was effective in improving the vowel spelling of 9-year-olds. Thus the older children used morphological information under priming conditions but there is no evidence to suggest that younger children did so.

Early Context-Conditioned Orthographic Knowledge in European Portuguese: The Spelling of the Schwa

“…If it is difficult for an educated adult, Veloso himself (Veloso, 2003), to be sure about the production or non-production of a schwa, how can we expect that a beginning speller count such a non-pronounceable, elusive, probably deleted, segment as a "sound" to be written? It is well-established that the explicit representation of phonemes is the harder cornerstone of the alphabetic principle acquisition (Morais et al, 1979;Morais, 2018) and that schwas are hard to spell (Treiman et al, 1993;Rosa and Nunes, 2010). Moreover, it is not clear why the provided explanation by Veloso (2003) would work for /S/ and /r/ but not for /l/.…”

“…There is also evidence that Portuguese schwas are challenging for beginning spellers. Rosa and Nunes (2010) presented first graders with oral sentences that included both a stem-word and its derived form containing a schwa (e.g., martelo, /meRtεlu/-hammer; martelar, /meRt1laR/-to hammer), and asked them to spell the derived word. Children produced errors on 57% of the schwas, even though the derived words preserved the spelling of the full-articulated respective stem vowel.…”