Morphological decomposition supports word recognition in primary school children learning to read: evidence from masked priming of German derived words

Abstract

Background: When reading a word, skilled adult readers automatically decompose the word into its separate morphemes by processing the word's morphoorthography. In children, however, it still remains unclear when and how they start to automatically decompose words into morphemes. Methods: To better understand how primary school children learn and integrate automatic morphological processes into their reading, we conducted a masked priming experiment with n = 218 first to fourth graders and a control group of 36 adult readers. Participants saw prime words on a computer screen for 67 ms, followed by a lexical decision task. For each target word, we constructed three prime words: an unrelated control prime, a semantic control prime and a test prime. The test prime was either morpho-semantically, morpho-orthographically or purely orthographically related to the target word. We analysed error rates and reaction times with linear mixed-effects models and linear combinations. Results: The error analysis revealed one significant interaction in the morpho-semantic condition for fourth graders. The reaction time analysis revealed different priming effects depending on age group: first and second graders showed no priming effects, while third graders showed priming in the morpho-semantic condition, and fourth graders and adults showed priming both in the morpho-semantic and morpho-orthographic condition. Conclusions: We conclude that (i) fourth graders automatically decompose written words into morphemes based on the words' morpho-orthography, (ii) third graders automatically detect stems in morphologically complex forms but do not rely on morpho-orthographic representations while (iii) first and second graders show no indication of either of these processes. Our results are theoretically consistent with the 'semantic view' within a localist account and can be explained by edge-aligned embedded word activation. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.

Special issue editorial: Advances in understanding the role of morphemes in literacy development

“…Morphological awareness predicted word reading and spelling after controlling for nonverbal cognitive abilities, age/grade, phoneme awareness and sublexical orthographic sensitivity. As described previously, Fleischhauer et al (2021) demonstrated a developmental progression in morpho-orthographic sensitivity that seemed to emerge earlier than has been shown in previous research in other languages (such as English). This suggests that the rich morpho-orthographic structure of German might contribute to earlier development of morpho-orthographic sensitivity during visual word recognition compared with more impoverished languages.…”

“…Several studies in this special issue highlight the importance of morphology throughout development and also begin to illustrate developmental changes. For example, Fleischhauer et al (2021) demonstrated developmental progression in the nature of morphological processing during word recognition in a masked primed lexical decision task.…”

“…One of the goals of this special issue was to bring together empirical evidence from different languages and contexts to inform these questions. To this end, this special issue includes studies in Chinese (Cantonese; Qiao et al, 2021), French (Rassel et al, 2021), German (Fleischhauer et al, 2021;Görgen, De Simone, Schulte-Körne, & Moll, 2021) and Norwegian (Lyster et al, 2021) and studies in English that draw upon the varied educational contexts of the United Kingdom (Dawson et al, 2021;James et al, 2021), the United States (Goodwin et al, 2021) and Canada (Georgiou et al, 2021;Ginestet et al, 2021). Qiao et al (2021) explored the relationship between morphological awareness and reading comprehension in both Chinese and English with Chinese-English bilingual children in Hong Kong (8 to 10 years old).…”

“…Two studies in this special issue examine morphological processes in German and demonstrate that the structure of the language influences when morphological processes are observed (Fleischhauer et al, 2021;Görgen et al, 2021). German has a rich morpho-orthographic structure but is asymmetrical in terms of transparency.…”

Morphological Processing in Children with Developmental Dyslexia: A Visual Masked Priming Study

“…The present study extends the previous findings in a morphologically rich and moderately phonologically transparent language, Dutch. Given the morphological richness of the language, children learning to read in Dutch may be more likely to develop visual morphological processing to support lexical access during the early stages of reading development (Fleischhauer, Bruns, & Grosche, 2021). However, the transparency of the Dutch orthography, which makes phoneme‐grapheme conversions more reliable than languages such as English, may result in a reduced reliance on the use of morphemes to support early reading efficiency.…”