Effects of Target Age and Genre on Morphological Complexity in Children’s Reading Material

Purpose Morphological regularities are an important feature of the English writing system, and exposure to written morphology may be key in development skilled word recognition. Our aim was investigate children’s experiences by analyzing a large-scale corpus reading materials spanning target age range from 5 14 years.Method Analysis based on Oxford Children’s Reading Corpus. We examined frequency distributions derived compound words genre, as well type token frequencies for individual derivational suffixes.Results found that proportion morphologically complex – particularly increased line with age, nonfiction contained more than fiction. Frequencies suffixes also varied Germanic forms common fiction texts younger children, Latinate older children.Conclusion These findings provide comprehensive picture how experience changes over course development. discuss these context developmental morphological processing, benefits limitations using natural language datasets.