The Role of Morphosyntactic Awareness in Conventional Lexical Segmentation

Abstract

Starting with the alphabetic stage of writing acquisition, the learner struggles with issues related to spelling, including the segmentation of writing in graphic words. This study examined the conventional segmentation of words and its relation to morphosyntactic awareness in a sample of students in the 4th and 5th years of elementary education in public schools. Results reveal a discrepancy between the oral identification of words and performance in the segmentation of writing, with three criteria being used by students to define “word”: (1st) full meaning; (2nd) sequence of letters, not only one or two; (3rd) frequency of word use. Statistical analyses revealed significant positive correlations between conventional segmentation and morphosyntactic awareness. It is inferred that morphosyntactic skills support the establishment of the conventional notion of the word, and it is suggested that teachers promote the development of these skills, in order to ensure a greater command of the written language.

Effects of Listening/Reading Comprehension and Morphological Awareness on First Graders’ Writing to Dictation: A Comparison of the Effect of Memorization

“…Finally, this study demonstrated that children's morphological awareness affected their writing to dictation, since a written language represents morphology (Guimaraes, 2013); therefore, an awareness of morphology may help children explore word composition or maintain its integrity when writing sentences. Kim (2013) revealed that morphological awareness played an important role in writing Hangeul, which is an agglutinative language with complex particles and suffixes, while other studies reported similar results in relation to spelling (Apel et al, 2012;Deacon, Kirby, & Casselman-Bell, 2009;Goodwin & Ahn, 2013;Green et al, 2003;Kim, 2013;Virginia et al, 2010;Walker & Hauerwas, 2006) composition (Kim, 2013;Northey, McCutchen, & Sanders, 2016), and conventional lexical segmentation (Guimaraes, 2013). However, none of these studies included the use of proper spacing and punctuation.…”

“…Being the basis of all learning, literacy is crucial for school-aged children, and a good level of spelling is particularly important (Berninger, 2000;Choi, Kim, Yun, & Sung, 2011;Kim, 2009). In general, students tend to struggle with spelling and conventional writing, though, during the alphabetic stage (Guimaraes, 2013); however, in dictation (Cho, 2003), while those with more morpho-syntactic awareness demonstrated both better spelling and use of punctuation (Bryant, Nunes, & Bindman, 2000). As a result, this study will focus on the formal (i.e., structural) aspects to confirm the effect of morphological awareness on young children's writing to dictation, including their use of spacing and punctuation.…”

O Planejamento E a Revisão De Textos Na Prática Pedagógica De Professores Do Ensino Fundamental

“…Entretanto, estas dificuldades dos alunos não foram adequadamente trabalhadas pela professora. Conforme explica Guimarães (2013), tanto na aquisição inicial como nos sujeitos com dificuldades na escrita a noção de palavra está baseada em unidades de significação. Por isso, as crianças reconhecem com mais facilidade as palavras que representam ideias, ou seja, as palavras lexicais ou de conteúdo, mas apresentam dificuldades na escrita de palavras que não possuem significados que possam ser tomados como uma unidade de significação independente do universo linguístico -como é o caso das preposições, artigos e conjunções, ou seja, nas palavras de forma ou palavras gramaticais.…”

Written narrative of students with and without difficulty in syntactic awareness

“…There is a reciprocal and close relationship between writtten language and SA which has been analyzed in studies conducted on populations of different languages such as Portuguese [3][4][5][6][7] , Chinese [8][9][10][11] , English 12,13 , and Spanish 14 . The instruments usually employed for SA evaluation consider the child's ability to judge whether the words are properly ordered in the sentence, whether there is nominal and verbal concordance between the words 2 , or using word categorization 6,15 .…”