Reading Complex Words pp 1-25 | Cite as
Linking Morphological Knowledge to English Decoding Ability: Large Effects of Little Suffixes
Abstract
It has long been known that an awareness of how letters correspond to speech sounds (or phones) is crucial for a child to learn to read English (Adams, 1990; Bradley & Bryant, 1985; Liberman, 1982; Mann, 1998; Perfetti, 1985). This allows young decoders of the English orthography to gain the insight that strings of letters, like b-i-g and d-o-g, can be sounded out and synthesized into words. A simplistic or ‘shallow’ phonemic decoding strategy, which ascribes one phoneme to each grapheme, is beneficial when the words to be decoded are orthographically regular and phonologically simple. However, by the fifth grade, more than 27 less common and more complex words (such as methodical and angelic) will be encountered each day (Anglin, 1993; Tyler & Nagy, 1989), and a more complicated decoding strategy must be used.
Keywords
Phonological Awareness Morphological Awareness Phoneme Awareness Complex Word Derivational MorphologyPreview
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