A Study of Base Frequency in Spanish Skilled and Reading‐Disabled Children: All Children Benefit from Morphological Processing in Defining Complex Pseudowords

Abstract

In this study, the base frequency (BF) effect is explored in reading-disabled and skilled readers of Spanish. A pseudoword definition task was completed by two groups of children. The pseudowords were composed from existing stems and affixes. The results show a facilitatory BF effect, suggesting that all children benefited from this aspect of morphology. A significant effect of group was also observed, showing that skilled readers scored better than reading-disabled children. The interaction between these variables was not significant. The overall pattern of data suggests that all children benefited from morphological processing to perform the definition task but that phonological difficulties in reading-disabled children prevented them from benefitting from the BF effect as much as their skilled peers.

Bilingualism and morphological awareness: a study with children from general education and Spanish-English dual language programs

“…Our finding converges with prior findings from research on phonological awareness (e.g. Bialystok et al, 2005;Bruck & Genesee, 1995;Campbell & Sais, 1995;Chen et al, 2004;Kuo & Anderson, 2010, 2012, while extending these findings to morphological awareness, an aspect of metalinguistic awareness that becomes progressively more critical once children move beyond the initial phase of learning to reading. Future research should focus on disentangling the sources of such bilingual advantage in the development of morphological awareness.…”

“…Instead, this suggests that through experience in two morphological and syntactic systems, bilingual children may become sensitive to more abstract principles of morphology and syntax, which benefit them in acquiring new suffixes and their syntactic properties. While more experimental research is needed, findings from the present study provide preliminary evidence supporting the structural sensitivity theory (Kuo & Anderson, 2010, 2012Kuo & Kim, 2014).…”

“…Furthermore, empirical studies with Spanishspeaking children have shown that morphological awareness is a critical component in learning to read in Spanish (e.g. Lázaro, 2012;Lázaro, Camacho, & Burani, 2013;Lazaro, Schreuder, & Aceituno, 2011).…”

“…Future research should focus on disentangling the sources of such bilingual advantage in the development of morphological awareness. Experimental research that involves bilingual participants whose two languages share different degrees of typological affinity and uses researcher-developed measures will help to further clarify how cross-language transfer (Bialystok et al, 2005;Chen et al, 2004) and enhanced sensitivity to structural features of language (Kuo & Anderson, 2010, 2012 jointly contribute to the bilingual effect on the development of morphological awareness.…”

“…This task has been widely used in research on morphological awareness (e.g. , 2012; however, because the task tapped into both morphological knowledge and syntactic knowledge (i.e. how words of different lexical categories should be combined to form sentences), we referred to it as a measure of morphosyntactic awareness in the present study.…”