Morphological knowledge as revealed in children's spelling accuracy and reports of spelling strategies

The goal of the current research was to assess whether children can make strategic use of morphological relations among words to spell. French-speaking children in Grade 4 spelled three word types: (a) phonological words that had regular phoneme-grapheme correspondences, (b) morphological words that had silent consonant endings for which a derivative revealed the silent ending, and (c) lexical words that had silent consonant endings for which no familiar derivative revealed the ending. Children were also asked to provide immediate retrospective reports of the strategies used to spell each word. Two experiments (Ns = 46 and 39) were conducted. As expected, children in Grade 4 spelled phonological words more accurately than they did words with silent consonant endings. In addition, children spelled morphological words more accurately than they did lexical words. Reports of using retrieval were associated with accurate performance across word types. Importantly, reports of using morphological strategies to spell morphological words were associated with a similar level of accuracy, as were reports of using retrieval. Even though children reported using a phonological strategy frequently across all word types, this strategy was associated with accurate performance only for spelling phonological words. Experiment 2 replicated the results of Experiment 1 with another set of stimuli and also showed that children's morphological awareness predicted their spelling accuracy for morphological words as well as the reported frequency of morphological strategy use. In sum, the findings revealed that most children showed evidence of adaptive strategy use.