Seeing the harm in harmed and harmful: Morphological processing by children in Grades 4, 6, and 8

Abstract

This study examined morphological processing of inflected and derived words by children in Grades 4, 6, and 8. Participants were shown root forms and inflected, derived, and orthographic control items (e.g., harm, harmed, harmful, or harmony), followed by a fragment completion task (e.g., completing h a_ _). Participants were equally likely to complete the fragment with the target root (e.g., harm for h a_ _) following priming with inflected or derived forms. This reflected a morphological effect; priming scores were higher for the inflected and derived forms than for orthographic counterparts. These effects were consistent across the grades studied, suggesting that morphological processing of inflected and derived words has a similar time course across Grades 4, 6, and 8.One lively area of research on the mental lexicon in both adults and children concerns the processing of words that contain several morphemes, or the smallest meaningful units of language. For developmental research, there is a particularly active line of investigation examining development in two key types of morphologically complex words: inflected and derived words. Inflected words contain an affix that specifies features such as case, tense, gender, or number but does not affect the syntactic category of the word (e.g., the addition of the suffix -s to the root read to mark the present tense in reads). In contrast, derived words have an affix that generally changes the syntactic category of the word (e.g., the addition of the suffix -er to the root verb read to form the noun reader). As we will see in the literature review that follows, there is a long history of research in the domain of oral language suggesting that there is particular growth in knowledge of derived forms in late childhood and into adolescence. The present study investigated this question through the use of a priming paradigm tapping awareness of the common root within inflected and derived words.

The Development of the Hebrew Mental Lexicon: When Morphological Representations Become Devoid of Their Meaning

“…Most of these studies, however, examined a single age group and thus could not shed light on the development of morphological knowledge. The few studies that examined morphological priming across different age groups tested English-speaking children and found consistent and equivalent priming effects across grades, suggesting that once the visual ability is present, it is stable and unchanging with age (Deacon et al, 2010;Rabin & Deacon, 2008). The present study is unique, for it is the first to find developmental changes in the morphological organization within the visual mental lexicon indicated by the morphological priming effect for semantic inconsistent words that was found among seventh graders but was absent among fourth graders.…”

“…These three studies, however, tested morphological priming at a single age group and thus cannot shed light on the development of morphemic organization. The two studies that Downloaded by [University Of Pittsburgh] at 11:48 12 October 2014 compared priming across different age groups of English-speaking children are Rabin and Deacon (2008), who tested children in Grades 1 to 5, and Deacon, Campbell, Tamminga, and Kirby (2010), who tested children in Grades 4, 6, and 8. Both used the fragment completion task and found morphological priming equal in strength for inflected (needs-need) and derived (needy-need) transparent words.…”

Preschool Phonological and Morphological Awareness As Longitudinal Predictors of Early Reading and Spelling Development in Greek

“…In fact morphological awareness is related not only to reading comprehension, but also to spelling (e.g., Deacon et al, 2009; Casalis et al, 2011), vocabulary (McBride-Chang et al, 2005; Sparks and Deacon, 2015), and word and pseudoword reading (Deacon and Kirby, 2004; Kirby et al, 2012). The contribution of morphological awareness to spelling is robust to a multitude of control variables (Deacon et al, 2009) and includes both inflected and derived forms (Deacon et al, 2010) beyond the spelling of specific morphemes (Casalis et al, 2011). …”

Lexical Morphology

“…Empirical data support the distinction in adult and pediatric populations (Badecker & Caramazza, 1989;Clahsen, Sonnenstuhl, & Blevins, 2003); however, there are parallels in terms of how the two morphological systems operate (Deacon, Campbell, Tamminga, & Kirby, 2010;Hay & Baayen, 2005;Stump, 2005). Empirical data support the distinction in adult and pediatric populations (Badecker & Caramazza, 1989;Clahsen, Sonnenstuhl, & Blevins, 2003); however, there are parallels in terms of how the two morphological systems operate (Deacon, Campbell, Tamminga, & Kirby, 2010;Hay & Baayen, 2005;Stump, 2005).…”

“…Phonological neighborhoods consist of lexemes (Storkel & Morrisette, 2002). develops independently of others, is still a challenge facing researchers (Deacon et al, 2010;Storkel, 2009). Word-finding errors may occur at the semantic or phonological levels, both in adults (Nozari, Kittredge, Dell, & Schwartz, 2010) and children (Faust, Dimitrovsky, & Davidi, 1997;German & Newman, 2004).…”