Young children’s knowledge about the links between writing and language

The present study tested the hypothesis (Byrne, 1996) that young children who do not yet understand that the elements of alphabetic writing represent phonemes link writing to language at the level of morphemes. We asked US preschoolers to write words that varied in the number of morphemes and the number of syllables that they contained. We identified a group of 50 children who used letters that represented phonemes in the intended words no more often than expected by chance (mean age = 4 years, 9 months). These prephonological spellers did not produce longer spellings for twomorpheme words such as teacup than for one-morpheme words such as napkin, although the length of their spellings was affected by the number of letters that they used to spell the previously presented word and by the order of the word in the experiment. The results suggest that the length of prephonological spellers’ productions is not influenced by the linguistic length of a message in phonemes, syllables, or morphemes, and they do not support the idea that these children show a special sensitivity to morphemes. Spoken language is the first form of language that children acquire, but modern children start learning about written language just a few years after they have begun learning about spoken language. Before formal literacy instruction begins, many children are already familiar with some of the visual aspects of writing, such as the fact that it tends to be laid out on lines, that the same written element tends not to appear multiple times in a row, and that writings tend to be smaller than drawings (e.g., Mortensen & Burnham, 2012; Puranik & Lonigan, 2011; Treiman & Yin, 2011). Many US preschoolers are also familiar with the shapes and names of some alphabet letters (e.g., Bowles, Pentimonti, Gerde, & Montroy, 2013; Phillips, Piasta, Anthony, Lonigan, & Francis, 2012; Puranik, Petscher, & Lonigan, 2014). Preschoolers may know a good deal about what writing looks like, but what do they know about how writing works as a symbol? This issue has been less well studied, and we addressed it in the present study. The most fundamental aspect of writing’s symbolic function is that it stands for language. In alphabetic writing systems, letters or letter groups symbolize phonemes. Consequently, phonologically longer messages are written with more letters than phonologically shorter messages. In one task testing children’s © Cambridge University Press 2017 0142-7164/17 Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0142716416000503 Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. Washington University St. Louis, on 09 May 2017 at 19:55:41, subject to the Cambridge Applied Psycholinguistics 2 Treiman & Boland: Links between writing and language knowledge of this fundamental concept, children are shown two letter strings, such as and , told that one says mow and the other motorcycle, and asked to guess which is which (Rozin, Bressman, & Taft, 1974). No knowledge of specific letter-to-sound correspondences is required for success, only knowledge that a written word with more letters should symbolize a spoken word with more sounds. This seemingly simple task is difficult for many children who have not begun formal literacy instruction (Kontos, 1988; Lundberg & Tornéus, 1978). The results just described suggest that many young children do not link units of writing to phonological units of language. The results reported by Byrne (1996) suggest that young children instead take letters and letter groups to symbolize morphemes (the smallest meaningful units of language). Support for this morphological hypothesis comes from experiments in which Australian 4-year-olds were shown a small set of written words and told what each word said. For example, children were told the identities of and and practiced until they could reliably read the words and pair them with pictures. Children were then shown novel pairs of written words, told the identities of the words, and asked which written word corresponded to which spoken word. For example, children were asked which of and was greener and which was green. Preschoolers performed above the level of chance when the added element was a morpheme (e.g., green/greener), but they performed poorly when the added element was not a morpheme (e.g., ham/hammer). This result is consistent with the hypothesis that young children treat writing as symbolizing language at the level of morphemes. The morphological hypothesis, if correct, would have a number of implications. Practically, it would support instructional programs that use morphemes as a bridge to learning about links between print and speech at the level of phonemes. Theoretically, it would suggest that children’s difficulties in grasping these links reflect the need to overcome a tendency to attend to units of meaning and to treat these as what writing represents. Although Byrne (1996) entertained other explanations for his results, the morphological explanation has garnered most attention (e.g., Liberman, 1999). Evidence for the morphological hypothesis is mixed, however. In one study, Levin and Korat (1993) showed Israeli preschoolers pairs of words such as xatula “female cat” (stem plus feminine morpheme; we transliterate Hebrew words into Latin script for ease of understanding) and xatul “cat,” told children the identities of the words, and asked them which word was which. Children who could treat a as symbolizing a meaningful unit, the feminine suffix, could have performed well even if they had no knowledge of letter–sound correspondences. However, the 5-year-olds in the study performed at chance levels. Levin and Korat also examined the number of marks that children used when asked to write the words. Children who treated writing as symbolizing morphemes should use more marks to write a two-morpheme word such as xatula than a one-morpheme word such as xatul, even if they did not use letters that made phonological sense. There was a trend in this direction for 5-year-olds, but it was not statistically significant. In another study, Treiman, Kessler, Decker, and Pollo (2016) compared US preschoolers’ spellings of two-morpheme words such as buying and one-morpheme verbs such as buy. The participants were prephonological spellers, Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0142716416000503 Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. Washington University St. Louis, on 09 May 2017 at 19:55:41, subject to the Cambridge Applied Psycholinguistics 3 Treiman & Boland: Links between writing and language namely, children who use letters that are plausible renditions of the phonemes in the spoken word no more often than expected by chance. Such children do not use more elements to write phonologically longer words than phonologically shorter words (Pollo, Kessler, & Treiman, 2009; Treiman, Pollo, Cardoso-Martins, & Kessler, 2013; Zhang & Treiman, 2015), and the results of Treiman et al. (2016) did not show even a trend toward an influence of morphological length. Although the results just described raise questions for the morphological hypothesis, they may not provide an ideal test of this hypothesis. This is because the studies compared words with a single content morpheme, such as buy, and words with a content morpheme and a function morpheme, such as buying. Function morphemes have little meaning on their own, and a number of investigators have suggested that young children think that function morphemes should not be represented in writing (Ferreiro, 1978; Ferreiro & Teberosky, 1982; Kato, Ueda, Ozaki, & Mukaigawa, 1999; Manning, Manning, Long, & Kamii, 1993). A better test of whether children link writing and language at the level of morphemes would use compound words such as teacup and cowboy, which contain two content morphemes. By around 4 years, children perform well at segmenting orally presented compound words into morphemes, better than at segmenting single-morpheme words into syllables (Lonigan, Burgess, Anthony, & Barker, 1998). Knowing that a spoken word such as teacup contains two units of meaning, even prephonological spellers may use more elements to write it than to write a one-morpheme word. Such a result would support the influential idea that young children link writing and language at the level of morphemes (Byrne, 1996), and it could help to explain why previous tests of this hypothesis have reported mixed findings. In the present study, therefore, we asked US 4and 5-year-olds who had not begun formal literacy instruction to write three types of words. Some words, such as fish and hand, contained one syllable and one content morpheme. Others, such as napkin and mustache, contained two syllables and one content morpheme. Words of the third type, including teacup and shoebox, contained two syllables and two content morphemes. Our main question was whether the length of prephonological spellers’ productions was influenced by number of morphemes. For example, would children use more letters to write teacup than napkin?