title: Fourth graders' sensitivity to morphological context in spelling.
abstract: An important aspect of spelling development in English involves the child's ability to use morphological context to deal with one-to-many sound-spelling mappings for word endings. One case involves /z/ endings that follow long vowels, where an "s" spelling is required in the case of inflected noun and verb contexts, but an "se" or "ze" spelling is required in the case of noninflected nouns and verbs. The present study examined the ability of good and poor spellers in Grade 4 to capture these morphological distinctions in a pseudoword spelling task. Overall, the good spellers outperformed the poor spellers, and both groups were more sensitive to the inflected-noninflected noun distinction than the inflected-noninflected verb distinction. These findings underscore the importance of linguistic factors in spelling development as well as the necessity of providing due consideration to these factors in spelling instruction.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Winnipeg, Canada.
authors.forename: Derrick C
authors.initials: DC
authors.lastname: Bourassa
authors.forename: Jennilee
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Beaupre
authors.forename: Krista
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Macgregor
mesh_terms: D000704:Analysis of Variance; D002648:Child; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010700:Phonetics; D012660:Semantics; D014705:Verbal Behavior / Q000502:physiology*; D014825:Vocabulary