Morpheme Position Coding in Reading Development
General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
Final Report Abstract
The project “Morpheme position coding in reading development” had aimed at investigating the sensitivity to distributional patterns of morpheme position in learning to read a morphologically rich language and by this contribute to our understanding of the acquisition of representations and mechanisms that are central to word reading. There is now some evidence showing that children start using morphological structure in reading during the elementary school years. This requires exact representations of morphemes and information about possible positions of the morphemes within a word might additionally facilitate word recognition: prefixes only occur wordinitial (re+read), suffixes only wordfinal (read+able), and stems both wordinitial and -final (house+boat, boat+house). No previous studies have examined whether they use information about morpheme position in this process. The current project achieved pioneer work in filling this research gap. Two computerized behavioral experiments, one of which was preregistered on the OSF platform, were conducted with elementary school children of 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade, as well as adults to investigate 1) whether suffixes are automatically identified as units in a position-specific fashion, and 2) whether position-distribution of stems influences compound processing. A third experiment directly comparing stem and suffix representations had to be abandoned, because of the inability to find satisfactory stimulus material in Italian. The results of the project overall suggest that morpheme position coding slowly develops throughout the course of reading development, but is not yet present when children first start to use morphological structure in reading. As such, it seems that morpheme position sensitivity arises from experience with written language. The project thus was the first to establish that morpheme position information in skilled reading is grounded in the uptake of distributional properties in language. This is an important insight to understand the acquisition of representations and mechanisms that are central to reading and its development. On a personal level, the project successfully lay the foundations for new fruitful academic collaborations.
