Morphological Effects on Orthographic Learning in Monolingual English-Speaking and Bilingual Chinese-English-Speaking Children

Morphological knowledge is known to be positively associated with reading ability. However, whether morphological knowledge affects children’s learning of new orthographic representations is less clear.

Purpose: This study aimed to investigate morphological effects on orthographic learning in English, and whether this effect, if any, is different for monolingual compared to Chinese-English-speaking bilingual children, who often have difficulty acquiring English inflectional morphology.

Method: 59 Year 2 children, including 29 English-speaking monolinguals and 30 Chinese-English-speaking bilinguals participated. We assessed children’s preexisting English inflectional morphological knowledge. The children learned twelve novel words that were either presented with morphological variation (e.g., vack, vacks, vacking, vacked) or pure repetition (e.g., vack x 4). Orthographic learning was measured by orthographic choice and spelling tasks.

Results: 1) orthographic learning from the spelling task showed better performance in the repetition condition, 2) there were no differences in orthographic learning between the monolinguals and bilinguals, despite the fact that the monolinguals had better inflectional morphological knowledge than the bilinguals.

Conclusion: Children learned novel written words better when they are presented without morphological variation, supporting the item-based feature of the self-teaching hypothesis. Chinese-English-speaking bilinguals’ weaker English morphological knowledge does not seem to hinder their orthographic learning ability.

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