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Linking Morphological Knowledge to English Decoding Ability: Large Effects of Little Suffixes

  • Virginia Mann
  • Maria Singson
Chapter
Part of the Neuropsychology and Cognition book series (NPCO, volume 22)

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 Morphology 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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© Springer Science+Business Media New York 2003

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Department of Cognitive Sciences, School of Social ScienceUniversity of CaliforniaIrvineUSA

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