Language-Specific Effects on the Development of Written Morphology

1.0 Introduction This paper discusses the morphology of children's written language from a developmental perspective, examining the acquisition of written morphology in gradeschool children from the beginning of formal literacy education to the end of gradeschool. We examine how children learning to spell Hebrew and Dutch – two typologically very different languages – approach problems in mapping phonology and morphology onto written graphemes in their respective languages. While morphology constitutes an important part of the spoken modality of many languages, it is also reflected in the written modality of languages with alphabetic orthographies, which often express morphological regularities in their units. For example, the consonantal root, which constitutes the lexical core of the word in Hebrew (Berman, 1987; Holes, 1995) takes slightly different forms in the Hebrew words mixtav 'letter', ktav 'writing', and ktuba 'marriage contract', due to stop / spirant alternation, but its written form remains consistent in MKTB, KTB, and KTWBH 1 respectively, despite these phonological alternations (Ravid, in press a). The aim of this study is to find out how such morphological consistencies in Hebrew and Dutch are learnt by Israeli and Belgian gradeschoolers, using an experimental design which looks into the acquisition of spelling. We intend to show that the acquisition of spelling is linguistic in nature and interacts with knowledge of spoken morphology. 1.1 Ways to overcome phonological neutralization The central phenomenon focused on in this paper is learning to overcome homophonous spelling resulting from neutralized phonological distinctions which are retained in the spelling system. Alphabetic orthographies are based on the grapho-phonemic principle, and thus learning consists of linking phonemes to graphemes. However, most orthographies are not entirely shallow: they do not reflect phonological information fully and accurately. Homophonous graphemes, which provide alternative spellings for the same phoneme, occur in many orthographies. For example, the homophonous Dutch form verplicht(t)e 'required, Adjective / Simple Past' may be spelled with either a single or a geminate but there is no change in the pronunciation. In the same way, the homophonous Hebrew form va'ir 'and-city / light' may be spelled with either or . These cases of opacity often result from neutralizations of underlying phonological distinctions in phonetic strings, which are nevertheless retained in the spelling system and are typical sources of spelling errors 2. It is possible, of course, to learn the spelling of homophonous words arbitrarily, or to use visually consistence patterns as cues. …