Stem and derivational-suffix processing during reading by French second and third graders

Morphological processing by French children was investigated in two experiments. The first showed that second and third graders read pseudowords such as chat-ure (cat-ish) composed of an illegally combined real stem and real derivational suffix faster and more accurately than they read matched pseudowords composed of a pseudostem and a real derivational suffix (e.g., chot-ure) or a pseudostem and a pseudosuffix (e.g., chot-ore). More, the chot-ure items were read faster and more accurately than the chot-ore items. These results suggest that beginning French readers are able to use morphological units (both stems and derivational suffixes) to decode new words. The second experiment compared the impact of display format on reading time. Suffixed words were presented in four segmentation formats: syllabic (ma lade), morphological (mal ade), morphological + 1 grapheme (mala de), or unsegmented (malade). For both groups of readers, the morphological + 1 condition generated the longest reading times but there was no difference between the other three conditions. It was concluded that syllables, morphemes, and whole word forms contribute to a similar extent to word reading for low-frequency words. Morphological processing may therefore be used early by French children to identify both new words and low-frequency words. Research on learning to read has mainly focused on when and how phonological mediation is acquired by beginning readers, mainly because this stage is crucial to becoming a skilled reader (for a review, see Sprenger-Charolles, Colé, & © Cambridge University Press 2011 0142-7164/11 $15.00 Applied Psycholinguistics 33:1 98 Colé et al.: Morphological processing by French school children Serniclaes, 2006). Recently, however, there has been a growing interest in another type of reading mechanism likely to develop in beginning readers: processing and identifying morphemes in written words in order to rapidly recognize the words they form. The morpheme is traditionally defined as the smallest unit of meaning in a language. In French, for example, the suffixed word chaton (kitten) would be recognized by means of its morphemes chat (cat) and -on (little). Until recently (but see Carlisle, 2003; Carlisle & Stone, 2005), most researchers interested in reading acquisition have considered morphological processing to come into play only after several years of reading. For Seymour (1997), following Frith (1985, 1986), the morphological structure of words is only used in reading after the child has mastered graphophonemic decoding. Morphology is brought to bear essentially to compensate for the irregularity of certain words (which cannot be correctly read by simple conversion of graphemes to phonemes). For these researchers, the use of morphological units in written word identification is a sign of skilled reading. Many studies have shown that skilled adult readers perform an automatic morphological analysis of complex words as they read (Barber, Dominguez, & De Vega, 2002; Bertram & Hyönä, 2003; Colé, Segui, & Taft, 1997; Longtin, Segui, & Hallé, 2003), so most research into the role of morphology in reading acquisition has focused on more advanced reading levels (after 3 or 5 years of instruction). Apart from a few studies on French (Casalis & LouisAlexandre, 2000; Colé, Royer, Leuwers & Casalis, 2004; Marec-Breton, Gombert, & Colé, 2005), Italian (Burani, Marcolini, & Stella, 2002), German (Verhoeven, Schreuder, & Baayen, 2003; Verhoeven, Schreuder, & Haarman, 2006), and Hebrew (Abu-Rabia, 2007), the research has mainly concerned English-speaking readers, seemingly without cross-linguistic comparisons. Yet the morphological systems of these languages (and more particularly, their derivational systems) are very different from the English one. The French morphological system, for example, is more productive than the English system, and Duncan, Casalis, and Colé (2009) found that metamorphological development is accelerated in French children between 5 and 8 years of age relative to English children of the same age. The main goal of the present study was to gain insight into learning to read in French, where the data is scarce (second grade) or totally lacking (third grade). More specifically, we looked into whether these beginning readers use morphological units to decode two kinds of items: pseudowords that have never be heard or read before (Experiment 1) and infrequent words (Experiment 2). Although there are not many studies on the role of morphological processing in the early stages of learning to read, two main research orientations can nevertheless be identified. The first focuses on the role of morphological awareness in word identification. Morphological awareness has been defined as the capacity to reflect upon and explicitly manipulate the morphological structure of words orally (Carlisle, 1995); this definition is based on the conventional definition of phonological awareness, which has proven to be one of the best predictors of reading success (for a review, see Sprenger-Charolles et al., 2006). The second orientation focuses directly on the processes involved in reading complex words. There are two types of morphologically complex words, inflected and derived. Inflected forms are composed of a stem, and one or two inflectional affixes that mark properties such as gender, number, tense, and person. Derived words (also Applied Psycholinguistics 33:1 99 Colé et al.: Morphological processing by French school children called suffixed words here) are composed of a stem (or base) and affixes, such as the suffix -er in the word dancer. Various linguistic criteria make it possible to distinguish inflectional affixes from derivational affixes, the main difference being that while derivational suffixes create a new lexeme, inflectional ones modify the lexeme to which they are attached (Beard, 2007; Stump, 2007). In the present study, we focused on derived word processing at the beginning of reading acquisition in French, for two main reasons. First, knowledge of derivational affixes appears to be a better predictor of reading success than knowledge of inflectional affixes (Deacon & Kirby; 2004; Muter, Hulme, Snowling, & Stevenson, 2004). Second, derivational forms constitute a large proportion of the new words that children learn during the elementary school years (Nagy & Anderson 1984), and some studies have shown that starting in a certain school grade, vocabulary size, and reading ability are linked (Carlisle, 2000). ROLE OF MORPHOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE IN LEARNING TO READ Studies of the first type use regression analysis to quantify the amount of variance in reading performance explained by morphological knowledge. Fowler and Liberman (1995), for example, observed significant correlations between second-, third-, and fourth-grade children’s performance on morphological tasks and word and pseudoword reading tasks, even after controlling for effects related to age and vocabulary size. A hierarchical regression analysis revealed that morphological task performance explained 42% and 34% of the variance in word and pseudoword reading, respectively. Studies by Shankweiler et al. (1995) and Mahony, Singson, and Mann (2000) showed that the contribution of metamorphological knowledge to word reading increased between the third and sixth grades, whereas that of metaphonological knowledge decreased in relative importance over the same period (but remained significant because it still explained between 10% and 15% of the variance). Similar trends were observed by Singson, Mahonny, and Mann (2000) for phonological awareness and by Carlisle (2000, 2003) for morphological awareness. The Singson et al. (2000) study indicated that phonological awareness contributed less and less to reading variance over the school years, dropping to 36% in third grade, 4% in fourth grade, 3.2% in fifth grade, and to only 1% in sixth grade. Carlisle (2000, 2003) showed that morphological knowledge contributed significantly to reading comprehension variance in third grade (43%) and fifth grade (where it rose to 55%; for inflection use, see also Deacon & Kirby, 2004). Unlike phonological awareness, then, morphological knowledge seems to play an increasingly important role in written word recognition (see also Nagy, Berninger, & Abbott, 2006). Although there are a few studies showing that morphological awareness can emerge in preliterate children (see, e.g., Bertram, Laine, & Virkkala, 2000, for Finnish and Dutch; Casalis & Louis-Alexandre, 2000, for French), which suggests that some kind of morphological knowledge is available to children when they start learning to read, studies with first and second graders are scarce, for the theoretical reasons mentioned above, and the data reported are contradictory. The English studies have revealed a significant contribution of derivational knowledge to reading performance in first graders (Carlisle & Nomanbhoy, 1993; Carlisle Applied Psycholinguistics 33:1 100 Colé et al.: Morphological processing by French school children & Fleming, 2003). For example, Carlisle and Nomanbhoy (1993) showed that metamorphological knowledge (of both inflections and derivations, the authors did not distinguish between the two) was involved in word reading as early as the first grade. Two metamorphological tasks were used. In their word-relationship judgment task, the child had to decide whether or not two words presented orally were connected (e.g., teach and teacher, doll and dollar). In the production task, the child had to complete an oral sentence by supplying the inflected or derived form of the stem word given (e.g., drive/ This man is a . . ./ driver.). The authors found that performance on these two tasks explained the children’s ability to read words to a small but significant degree (4%). Phonological tasks contributed more heavily (explaining 22.09% of the variance). By contrast, in the study with French-speaking children (Casalis & LouisAlexandre, 2000), which separated derivational data from inflectional data, production-task performance did not explain any variance until second grade, where it accounted for 16% on a standardized reading test (Lefavrais’s Alouette, 1967) and 24.2% on a written sentence comprehension test (Lecocq’s E.CO.S.SE, 1996). Carlisle (1995) and Fowler and Liberman (1995) obtained similar results, suggesting that metamorphological knowledge is utilized relatively early in reading (by second grade), especially in reading comprehension.1 The finding that morphological awareness made little or no contribution during the initial learning stages could be because the tasks used tapped explicit knowledge. In a longitudinal study of children in the first and second years of elementary school, Colé et al. (2004) found that performance on a task designed to measure implicit word relationship judgments (involving no conscious manipulation of morphological knowledge by the child) was related to reading level as early as the first elementary school grade (the word relationship judgment task used was Carlisle and Nomanbhoy’s, 1993). By contrast, performance on explicit tasks did not determine reading level until second grade, suggesting that morphological knowledge may be brought to bear in reading even when children cannot explicitly analyze the morphological structure of words. MORPHOLOGICAL PROCESSING AND WRITTEN WORD RECOGNITION IN LEARNING TO READ A smaller number of studies have attempted to directly examine how the reading of complex words is affected by their morphological structure. They showed that for English, readers carry out a morphological analysis of derived words as early as the third grade. Mann and Singson (2003) asked children to read aloud suffixed words whose stem was frequent or infrequent but whose “surface” form (the complete derived word) was of comparable frequency to the other words on the list. The stems of the “high-stem” words (e.g., movement, stem = move) occurred 70 or more times per million and the stems of the “low-stem” words (e.g., equipment, stem = equip) occurred less than once per million. The results showed that already by the third grade, children were sensitive to the frequency of a derived word’s stem and decoded low-stem words less successfully than comparable words with high-frequency stems. As early as third grade, then, suffixed words appear to be parsed during reading as stem + suffix. Applied Psycholinguistics 33:1 101 Colé et al.: Morphological processing by French school children Carlisle and Stone (2003) reported similar data. They showed that English second and third graders (as well as fourth to sixth graders) were able to use the morphological structure of suffixed words. They read suffixed words like windy faster and with greater accuracy than pseudosuffixed forms like candy (see also Carlisle & Stone, 2005). Laxon, Rickard, and Coltheart (1992) demonstrated that English readers ages 7 to 10 processed inflected forms and derivations as they read (detailed analyses according to word type were not given). These authors found that when word pairs were read out loud, suffixed forms (dancer/locked) generated significantly fewer errors than pseudosuffixed words whose final letter strings have the form of a suffix but do not perform this function (dinner/wicked). These results were also obtained with suffixed pseudowords (such as fooder) and pseudosuffixed pseudowords (such as rinter). For Italian, morphological knowledge also seems to play an important role in visual word recognition. Burani et al. (2002) confirmed this hypothesis by showing that Italian third graders relied on morphological processing to read. These authors compared reaction times for lexical decision and naming tasks involving pseudowords made up of a stem and illegally combined derivational suffixes (e.g., donn-ista), as well as nonmorphological pseudowords (e.g., dennosto). They obtained identical results for the two tasks in all groups studied (third to fifth graders): “morphological” pseudowords were pronounced more rapidly than “nonmorphological” ones. As Burani et al. (2002) suggested, it may be the availability of preassembled morphological units (stems and suffixes) that results in more efficient naming compared to the more laborious grapheme–phoneme decoding, the only process available for new words with no morphological structure. This morphological processing is called morpholexical by Burani et al. (2002). However, some studies have also found that suffixed word reading is dependent on phonological factors. Mann and Singson (2003; for similar results, see also Laxon et al., 1992) showed that suffixed word reading is dependent on phonological constraints up to the fifth grade, echoing findings obtained for inflected forms (Feldman, Rueckl, DiLiberto, Pastizzo, & Vellutino, 2002; Laxon et al., 1992). English thirdthrough sixth-grade readers were asked to read aloud suffixed words that were either phonologically transparent (quickly) or phonologically opaque (easily). The results indicated that transparent suffixed words were read more accurately than opaque ones, but the phonological-transparency effect was only found for third and fourth graders. The authors accounted for the large improvement in the reading of opaque suffixed forms by fifth graders in terms of Anglin’s (1993) observation that fifth-grade reading material contains more morphologically complex words. In summary, the studies reviewed above indicate that English-speaking children use morphological chunks to read words and decode new words and Italian children do so to decode new words only. The processing of morphological units seems to be acquired gradually between the end of the second (or third) grade and the end of elementary school (but see Rapin & Deacon, 2008). However, until a relatively advanced grade, the processing of such units continues to be influenced by phonological factors. In French, the only study available on this topic is Marec-Breton et al.’s (2005). With first and second graders reading aloud, they compared suffixed words such Applied Psycholinguistics 33:1 102 Colé et al.: Morphological processing by French school children as danseur (dancer) to pseudosuffixed words such as douleur (pain), and suffixed pseudowords (pseudowords with illegally combined morphemes) such as mordage (bite-age) to pseudosuffixed pseudowords such as soumage. They found that suffixed pseudowords were read better by second graders (but not by first graders) than pseudosuffixed pseudowords, but there was no difference for words (danseur vs. douleur). In addition, morphological structure had no effect on reading time. Yet the French data obtained by Casalis and Louis-Alexandre (2000) and Colé et al. (2004) suggest that, for this language, morphological processing starts in second grade for both word and pseudoword reading. Because of the virtual lack of French data, additional studies are needed for this language. In particular, because Marec-Breton et al. (2005) did not include a “monomorphemic” control condition, there is no way of knowing whether the pseudosuffixed words or pseudowords were processed as one-morpheme units, or whether the suffix caused them to be processed differently. Finally, given that these authors did not find a morphological structure effect for words, our first experiment pertained to pseudoword reading. EXPERIMENT 1: READING MORPHOLOGICALLY