Developmental Psychology
1997, Vol. 33, No. 4, 637-649
Copyright 1997 by the American Psychological Association, Inc.
0012-1649/97^3.00
Morphological Spelling Strategies: Developmental Stages and Processes
Terezinha Nunes
Peter Bryant
University of London
University of Oxford
Miriam Bindman
University of London
The spelling of many words in English and in other orthographies involves patterns determined by
morphology (e.g., ed in past regular verbs). The authors report a longitudinal study that shows that
when children first adopt such spelling patterns, they do so with little regard for their morphological
basis. They generalize the patterns to grammatically inappropriate words (e.g., sofed for soft). Later
these generalizations are confined to the right grammatical category (e.g., keped for kept) and finally
to the right group of words (regular verbs). The authors conclude that children first see these spelling
patterns merely as exceptions to the phonetic system and later grasp their grammatical significance.
The study included two new measures of grammatical awareness, both involving analogies, that
predicted success with spelling inflectional morphemes in later sessions.
They spell when as wen, for example, and sucked as sukt (Read,
1986; Treiman, 1993). However, there is not yet much evidence
for a later orthographic stage. This may be because orthographic
is a broad term. There are several kinds of higher order rules
to be learned in reading, and there is no guarantee that all are
learned in the same way. The solution is to look at specific types
of orthographic rules.
One important set of higher order spelling patterns is based
on grammar. (We will use the expression grammar to cover
syntax and morphology considered together and the latter terms
when we wish to emphasize a particular aspect of grammar.) In
English, as in most European orthographies, the same sound is
often spelled in one way in one part of speech and in quite
another way in a different part of speech. For example, the last
phonemes in the words bold and list are spelled as d and /.
However, exactly the same phonemes are spelled as ed in the
words rolled and kissed, because this is the conventional spelling
for the inflectional morpheme in regular past verbs.
Some research shows that children spell such words phonetically at first and then later go on to use morphological and
syntactic spelling strategies. In Portuguese, many sounds that
are the same in speech are spelled in different ways depending
on the grammatical status of the word involved. For example,
the suffixes ice and isse are pronounced in exactly the same
way in Portuguese, but ice is a derivational morpheme used in
abstract nouns and isse is an inflectional morpheme for the
subjunctive. A study in Brazil (Nunes Carraher, 1985) in which
children had to write pseudowords, embedded in a context that
made their grammatical status clear, showed that younger children stuck to one form of spelling of such sounds regardless of
the grammatical status of the pseudoword. Older children, in
contrast, varied their spelling according to the pseudowords'
grammatical status.
Beers and Beers (1992) documented U.S. children's increasing ability to use morphological information to generate spellings. They worked with words and pseudowords and used three
When we learn how to play a complex game, we usually
work out the basic strategies first and then develop more sophisticated ones as we play the game again and again. This paper
examines the possibility that learning to read and write also
works in this way: Children may use basic strategies at first
and add other more sophisticated ones later. Rith (1985), for
example, claimed that children first go through an "alphabetic
stage" when they adopt an entirely phonetic strategy in their
spelling and learn about the basic relationships between letters
and sounds. Only later do they reach the "orthographic stage"
in which they grasp the higher order, more sophisticated aspects
of the nature of their written language. Marsh, Friedman, Welch,
and Desberg (1980) made much the same distinction between
an early stage in which children master letter-sound correspondences and later "advanced" stages when they grasp the more
sophisticated principles of spelling.
There is a great deal of evidence for an initial phonetic stage
in spelling. When children begin to spell words systematically
they tend at first to represent the sounds of words phonetically:
Terezinha Nunes and Miriam Bindman, Department of Child Development and Learning, Institute of Education, University of London, England; Peter Bryant, Department of Experimental Psychology, University
of Oxford, England.
We are extremely grateful to the Medical Research Council (UK),
which supported this project, and also to the staff and children in the
participating schools in Oxford—Wblvercote First School, Botley Primary
School, Cassington Primary School, Kennington Primary School—and in
London—William Tyndale Primary School, Honeywell Infants' and Junior
School, Ravenstone Primary School, and Trinity St. Mary's Church of
England Primary School. We are also very grateful to Gill Surman for
collecting data in Oxford and for a great deal of administrative work.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Terezinha Nunes, Department of Child Development and Learning, Institute
of Education, University of London, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1H
OAL England. Electronic mail may be sent via Internet to temstnu@
ioe.ac.uk.
637
638
NUNES, BRYANT, AND BINDMAN
morphologically determined spelling patterns, s for plurals, ed
for past regular verbs, and ing for the continuous. They also
showed that young children spell these endings phonetically
whereas older children use a morphological strategy in spelling.
Treiman (1993) reported similar results from a detailed study
of the writing of some children in their first year at school. She
found that most of the children represented the endings of regular past verbs phonetically (jumt for jumped); only about 12%
of these words were given the correct ed ending. This suggests
that children start spelling phonetically and later add the conventional ed ending for regular verbs to their repertoire. However,
these data were not developmental: With the exception of one
child, Treiman did not study changes in the children's use of
the ed spelling during the year.
In another study, Treiman, Cassar, and Zukowski (1994) produced some evidence that a minority of first graders and a
majority of second graders might incorporate morphological
knowledge of flaps such as the middle consonant in dirty and
city. In the American dialect, this is usually pronounced as /d/
but Treiman et al. reported that American first and second graders are more likely to give the correct / spelling to two-morpheme words, like dirty, in which the final sound of the stem
word {dirt) is pronounced as /t/, than to one-morpheme words
like city. The fact that this effect was found in first graders does
show some early use of morphemes in spelling, but it should
also be noted that the effect was stronger in the second graders.
Totereau, Thevenin, and Fayol (in press) reported that children learning to read and write in French have difficulty with
morphologically based spellings. In oral French, plurals are not
marked, and initially children omit, for example, the s at the
end of plural nouns. Only by Grade 3 do children spell plurals
correctly and systematically both for nouns and for verbs.
Thus data from three languages converge in suggesting a
developmental change from using a predominantly phonetic
strategy to adopting both phonetic and morphological strategies.
However, there is no detailed account of how children make this
transition, and in our view such an account must be based on
longitudinal data.
We should also consider what causes the transition. There are
two main possibilities: (a) that the changes are due to the child's
experience with written words, and (b) that they are the result
of a developmental increase in the child's awareness of grammatical relationships in spoken as well as in written language.
The first hypothesis is that the developmental sequence is rooted
in the phonetic strategy and that is the essential starting point
in learning about alphabetic scripts. Only after mastering the
basic letter-sound correspondences can the child become aware
of exceptions to these correspondence rules and search for an
explanation for them. In the case of ed at the end of past regular
verbs, the child would use his or her grammatical knowledge
to find the explanation. The grammatical knowledge necessary
for this discovery is there all along: The children's experience
with reading and spelling paces the development of their
spelling.
The second of these two hypotheses is that the children's
progress in spelling morphemes is paced by their growing
awareness of grammar in spoken language. As the explicit
awareness of morphological and syntactic distinctions in spoken
language develops, so too does their ability to learn the appropriate conventional spellings for these grammatical distinctions.
This second hypothesis suggests that measures of awareness
of grammatical distinctions should predict how well individual
children subsequently learn about morphologically based spelling patterns. In fact, some studies have already shown that children's performance in tasks of morphological recognition (the
"comes from" task: Does the word teacher come from teach?)
correlates with their spelling scores (Derwing, Smith, & Wiebe,
1995) and that tasks of production of morphologically associated words (the sentence completion task: four. The big racehorse came in
) predict spelling scores even after controlling for age and vocabulary (Fowler & Liberman, 1995). However, these are correlations with general spelling tasks; the
studies did not deal specifically with the use of morphological
strategies in spelling. Furthermore, in Fowler and Liberman's
sentence completion tests of awareness of morphology, children
might be using both semantic and grammatical knowledge to
complete the sentences. We need more rigorous tests of grammatical awareness, and these should be specifically related to
children's spelling of morphemes.
In summary, we need the answer to two questions. The first
is about the precise nature and time course of the transition
from phonetic spelling to spelling that incorporates conventional
representations of morphemes. The second is about the causes
of this transition. Longitudinal data are needed to answer both
questions, and so we set up a large-scale longitudinal study of
children's spelling and of possible related variables.
Method
Participants
There were 363 children in the study to start with, 175 from London
and 188 from Oxford, England. In each city the children were sampled
from three grade levels (Grades 2, 3, and 4 in school) at the time of the
first session. The project lasted for 3 years and we saw the children three
times a year. In this article we report data from three sessions, which
cover a period of 20 months. The first (Session A) was also the first
session of the project. The next session (Session B) that we report came
7 months after and was in fact the third session of the project. The last
session to be reported in this article (Session C) came 13 months after
Session B and was the sixth session in the project. Table 1 gives the mean
ages of the children in the three grade levels in each of the three sessions.
The children were drawn from eight different schools, four in each city.
The intake to these schools varied considerably in socioeconomic terms,
thus the sample covered a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds. All
the children had learned English as their first language. Throughout the
article, we combine data for the two cities.
Procedure
The Spelling Task
In all three sessions we asked the children to spell 30 words, which
are presented in Table 2 and which provide the spelling data for this
article. (In each session, these words were presented together with other
words that are not described here.) Ten of the 30 words were regular
past verbs and therefore their last consonant sound was spelled as ed;
10 were irregular past verbs, and so their final consonant was spelled
phonetically; and 10 were nonverbs whose final consonant was also
spelled phonetically. All these words ended in two consonantal sounds,
639
MORPHOLOGICAL SPELLING STRATEGIES
Table 1
The Children's Ages in Each Session and Their IQs
Session
A
Age group
Young
M
SD
Middle
M
SD
Old
M
SD
Total sample
B
C
IQ
n
Age
n
Age
n
105.7
19.3
96
6y 6m
89
7y lm
81
8y 2m
4.2
103.6
18.8
124
110
9y lm
3.4
105.6
20.5
143
121
lOy 3m
4.9
4.2
7y 5m
4.5
111
3.2
8y 6m
3.7
134
5.3
9y lm
4.8
334
363
7y l l m
Age
302
Note. Mean ages are given in years (y) and months (m), and standard deviations for ages are given in
months.
and the last consonant was a 161 sound in half the words and a til
sound in the rest. The six sublists of words were matched for frequency
(Carroll, Davis, & Richman, 1971).
Our method with each word was to say it, then to say a sentence that
contained the word, and finally to repeat the word ("Lost. I lost my
book at school. Lost."). We then asked the child to write the word. We
varied the order in which we presented the words to the children.
The Three Grammatical Awareness Tasks
Our aim in the grammatical tasks was to measure awareness of the
distinctions between different parts of speech and of the relation between
present and past verbs. We devised three oral tasks, which are presented
in the Appendix. The children had to carry out a morphological transformation of a previously heard word. The tasks were given in Session A.
Sentence analogy task. There were eight trials, and they were presented with the support of two puppets. In each trial the first puppet
"said" a sentence and then the second puppet "repeated" it but with
Table 2
The Spelling Word List
Verbs and nonverbs
Verb type
Id! sound ending
lii sound ending
Regular verbs
called
covered
filled
killed
opened
dressed
kissed
laughed
learned
stopped
Irregular verbs
found
heard
held
sold
told
felt
left
lost
sent
slept
Nonverbs
bird
cold
field
gold
ground
belt
except
next
paint
soft
a change to die tense of the verb. Then the first puppet said a second,
quite similar, sentence; the child was asked to play the role of the second
puppet and to make the same change to this sentence as the puppet had
to the first. The changes, which we made to one verb and which the
child had to make to the other, were from present or present continuous
to past tense or vice versa. Our aim was to see how well each child
transformed die tenses.
The use of regular and irregular past verbs was systematically varied.
Our concern was with children's explicit understanding of the relation
between present and past verbs whether the past form was regular or
not. There is clear evidence (Marcus et al., 1992) that different mechanisms may be involved in the production and recognition of regular and
irregular forms, but we aimed to test linguistic knowledge that would
transcend this division and would treat past verbs as a whole. In some
trials, both the sentences involved either regular or irregular past verbs;
in other trials, the first sentence involved a regular, and the second
sentence an irregular, past verb and in others vice versa. According to
previous research (Fowler & Liberman, 1995), this should produce
greater variation in the scores, thereby allowing for the use of more
sophisticated statistical analyses.
This task and the subsequent task are analogy tasks, because die
a:b::c:d format is the same as that of analogy tasks used in cognitive
psychology (Piaget, Montanegro, & Billeter, 1977; Sternberg, 1977).
Word analogy task. This task had the same a:b::c:d analogy format,
but with single words. The Appendix shows that the different transformations were from noun to adjective, noun to verb, present to past verb,
and vice versa in each case. The past verbs involved were regular in
some cases and irregular in others.
Productive morphology task. We adapted Berko's (1958) pseudoword task. In each trial we showed a picture of a person doing something and we described the picture, using a pseudoword, which stood
for a verb, a noun, or an adjective; the pseudoword was always used
twice and in two forms. Then we produced an incomplete sentence in
which the missing word was the pseudoword. In some trials the correct
response was to add an inflectional or a derivational suffix that we had
not used in the description: in others, it was to produce the bare form
after having heard the pseudoword with attached suffixes. When the task
was to produce a past tense for the pseudowords, children occasionally
but rarely produced an irregular form, which we accepted as correct if
it was plausible. The first item was always a change from singular to
plural, which is rather easy for children at this age level (Berko, 1958);
die order of the remaining items was varied between children.
640
NUNES, BRYANT, AND BINDMAN
Standardized Tests
Three months after Session A we gave all the children a shortened
version of the revised Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (Wechsler, 1977), which contained three verbal (Vocabulary, Similarities, Digit
Span) and three performance (Object Assembly, Block Design, Coding)
subtests. We also gave the children the Schonell standardized reading
(single-words) test (Schonell & Goodacre, 1971) in Sessions A and C.
Results
The results are presented in three sections. The first is a
preliminary description of the spelling patterns. The second section presents and examines a five-stage developmental theory.
In the third section, we look at the link between children's
grammatical awareness and the progress that they make in
spelling.
Preliminary Description of the Spelling Data
We have argued that children initially spell phonetically and
ignore the conventional spellings for morphemes; later, possibly
on the basis of an increasing grammatical awareness, they begin
to understand and adopt these conventional spellings. In this
case, some children should spell the endings of the words phonetically and others should adopt the conventional spelling for
the endings of regular verbs. We found both patterns plentifully,
but we also found other patterns that suggested a more complex
and more interesting developmental sequence than just a simple
transition from nonmorphological to morphological spelling.
Unsystematic Spelling
Some of the spellings of the word endings were unsystematic.
In some cases the ending which the child added to the stem
bore no resemblance to the end sound or to the conventional ed
spelling; in others the child simply did not spell the last sound
at all. In most cases where the children omitted the ending, their
attempt to write the stem of the word was far from a correct
phonetic rendering of that stem. In Session A, 8% of the children
produced unsystematic spellings like this with over half the
words in our 30 word list. This suggests that there may be
an early stage in which children's spelling of word endings is
unsystematic.1
Phonetic Transcriptions
As expected, we did find many examples of children spelling
most of the regular verb endings phonetically. In Session A, for
example, 17% of the children never spelled any of the regular
verbs with an ed and spelled at least half of them phonetically.
Generalizations to Irregular Verbs and to Nonverbs
A more surprising kind of error was the generalization of the
ed ending to words that were not regular past verbs that we
found in a large number of children.
In Session A, 134 out of a total of 363 children (34%) generalized the ed spelling to irregular past verbs at least once (e.g.,
sleped). In Session B, the percentage of children making this
mistake at least once increased to 38% and still further in session
C to 42%. Even more impressively, 71% of the children whom
we tested in Session C had made at least one such generalization
in one of the three sessions.
We have a more surprising fact to report about generalizations. Many children generalized the ed spelling pattern to the
wrong grammatical category (i.e., to nonverbs). No reports of
generalizations of this spelling pattern exist, but we found them
consistently. In Session A, 104 of the children (29% of the whole
sample) generalized the ed spelling to at least one nonverb. So
they wrote, for example, soft as sofed or ground as grouned.
Roughly the same proportion of children made these ungrammatical generalizations in Sessions B and C as well. By Session
C, over half (56%) of the children whom we tested in that
session had made at least one such generalization to a nonverb
in one or more of the three sessions.
There were consistent differences between individual words
in the number of false generalizations made to them. In Sessions
A and B, the three commonest generalizations were with the
words slept, field, and held; in Session C, they were slept,
held, and except. In all three sessions the smallest number of
generalizations was made to the words sent and paint.
One interesting point about these generalizations is that many
children produced them with words that they had spelled correctly in previous sessions. In Session B, 36 children made at
least one incorrect ed generalization to particular irregular verbs
that they had spelled correctly in Session A, and 20 children
produced them with nonverbs that they had spelled correctly in
Session A. The equivalent figures for the numbers of children
spelling particular words correctly in Session B but misspelling
them by generalizing the ed sequence in Session C were 35 for
irregular verbs and 17 for nonverbs.
Generalization and the Possibility of Artifacts
Both kinds of generalization, but particularly those to nonverbs,
are surprising and potentially important. We must therefore make
sure that they are genuine generalizations of ed and not the result
of some artifact of the words or methods that we used.
One possible artifact concerns words that end in /d/ and also
have a long vowel sound (like cold). Some children may have
given these words an ed ending not because they were generalizing the ed sequence, but because they placed an e before the d
in an attempt to apply the rule that a final e lengthens the
preceding vowel. However, the results provide no support at all
for this idea. If the idea was right, children would put ed at the
end of words with long vowels and ending in /d/ particularly
frequently. This did not happen. The words ending in /d/ that
had the long lot vowel sound were sold, told, cold, and gold.
In Session A, the mean number of generalizations made with
told (.11) was slightly above general average for individual
irregular verbs ending in /d/ (.09) and the average for sold
(.09) was in line with that general average. The average number
1
One quite rare mistake was to write either a correct or phonetically
plausible stem but to omit the ending (e.g., help for helped or sen for
sent). In Session A, for example, the proportion of these errors was
0.2% with regular verbs and 0% with irregular verbs and nonverbs.
Again we simply treated these as errors and did not use them in any
other way in our analyses.
641
MORPHOLOGICAL SPELLING STRATEGIES
of generalizations for individual nonverbs ending in /d/ in that
session was .05 and the average for cold was also .05, whereas
the average for gold was only .02. In Sessions B and C, the
average for told was again slightly above the general average
for individual irregular verbs, but the averages for sold, cold,
and gold were all below the averages for the general averages
for irregular verbs and for nonverbs. Turning to other long vowel
words, above average numbers of generalizations were made to
field in all sessions but below average numbers of generalizations to found and ground. There is no evidence here of a bias
to introduce e before the d in response to long vowel sounds.
A second possible artifact concerned two words, in which
the penultimate letter was r: heard and bird. In London, people
tend not to pronounce the r (though the sound is pronounced
in the Oxfordshire accent). Thus some children might think that
the main vowel in either of these words should be spelled either
as e or as a combination of letters ending in e such as ie. In
this case they would use an ed ending as part of an attempt to
represent the vowel and not because they were generalizing the
conventional ed ending. They might write heard as hed or bird
as bied or, if they know that there is an r there somewhere but
cannot remember where, they might write hred or bred.
Thirty-three children wrote ed at the end of heard in Session
A, 26 in Session B, and 33 in Session C (total of 92). Fifteen
children spelled bird with an ed ending in Session A, 7 in
Session B, and 6 in Session C (total of 28). In the 92 cases in
which heard was given an ed ending, the word was written as
heared 26 times, hered 63 times, hared twice and hred once.
In the 28 cases of bird written with an ed ending, the spelling
was bired 9 times, bered 13 times, bied 5 times, and biued once;
four of these last six misspellings that did not include an r were
made by the Oxford sample where the r is pronounced. Thus
there is very little evidence that with these two words the ed
pattern was a product of the nonpronunciation of r.
A final possible objection is that the generalizations could
have been an artifact of our procedure of giving the children a
list of words, which included many past regular verbs. This may
have prompted the children to use the ed ending more than they
would have otherwise. This explanation seems implausible to
us. The list given to the children consisted of other words besides
the 30 words described here and these other words varied between sessions. In Sessions A and C, the list included seven
interrogative pronouns as well, but in Session B the children
had to spell a list of 79 words in all, which were divided into
two sublists presented on different days. None of the other 49
words involved the ed spelling pattern. So the concentration of
ed words was considerably diluted in Session B, and yet many
children generalized the ed ending in that session as well. The
percentage of children who put at least one ed at the end of an
irregular verb was 27% in Session A, 26% in Session B, and
32% in Session C. The equivalent figures for children placing
eds at the end of nonverbs were 29% in Session A, 25% in
Session B, and 28% in Session C. Thus the pattern of generalizations seems to have been constant across sessions. We conclude
that the ed endings given to irregular verbs and nonverbs were
genuine generalizations.
Implications of the Generalizations
The generalizations of the ed ending to nonverbs suggest
that some children used this sequence without understanding its
grammatical basis. These children may be going through an
intermediate stage in which they realize that ed is sometimes
the right spelling for a /d/ or a III ending but do not understand
that this is only so for past verbs.
On the other hand, children who only generalize the ed endings to irregular verbs and not to nonverbs have probably realized that the ed ending is restricted to past verbs but have not
yet worked out the exceptions to this rule.
Both kinds of spellers exist. In Session A, for example, 20%
of the children made at least one generalization both to nonverbs
and to irregular verbs; in the same session 14% made at least
one to irregular verbs and none to nonverbs. This suggests that
there are two intermediate stages between phonetic and correct
morphological spelling. In one of these the child realizes that
some words ending in /d/ or /t/ are spelled as ed without understanding the grammatical basis for this exception to letter-sound
rules. In the other stage, the child realizes that there is a grammatical constraint to the ed spelling but has not yet learned
about the exceptions to this new grammatically based rule.
The Stage Model
These preliminary data therefore suggest five stages in the
development of spelling. In the first, children do not spell the
endings of words systematically; in the second, they spell words
phonetically and ignore the nonphonetic conventional spelling
for the inflectional morpheme; in the third, they begin to realize
that the conventional nonphonetic ed spelling is sometimes a
legitimate way of representing the final /d/ or /t/ sound but do
not know that they must restrict it to one grammatical category.
In Stage 4, they grasp the grammatical significance of the ed
spelling and confine it to past verbs, regular and irregular, and
in the final stage they learn about exceptions and apply the
spelling to regular past verbs only. This five-stage mode] is
outlined in Table 3.
Our first step in testing this stage model was to group the
children into the five developmental stages on the basis of their
spelling. Our criteria for placing children in particular stages
were objective and the selection was done by computer. Ror
Stage 1, we set the requirement that the children should spell less
than half of the endings that should be spelled phonetically—the
endings of the nonverbs and the irregular verbs—correctly. All
such children, we argued, were at the prephonetic stage because
they were not able to use letter-sound correspondences consistently enough.
This meant that to be included in Stages 2 to 5 all the children
had to spell half or more of the endings of irregular verbs and
nonverbs correctly. We set the criterion as high as this, because
of the relatively large number of correct spellings of these word
endings even among the youngest children.
For Stage 2 we also required that (a) the children should
make at least five phonetic transcriptions of regular past verbs
{killed as killd) but (b) they should produce very few (less than
three) ed spellings for any of the words. We made an allowance
for one or two ed endings in the phonetic stage because of the
possibility of children memorizing the spelling of one or two
specific regular verbs from our list of 10. We decided that a
morphologically based spelling strategy would produce more
than 2 out of 10 correct spellings of regular verb endings.
642
NUNES, BRYANT, AND BINDMAN
Table 3
The Five Developmental Stages: Their Characteristics and the
Number of Children Assigned to Them
No. of children in
each category
and session
Stage
4
5
Characteristics of the
children's spelling
Typical spelling
Unsystematic spelling of word endings
Frequent phonetic transcriptions of endings:
failure to produce eds
Some ed endings, but generalizations to
irregular verbs and nonverbs (i.e., failure
to confine this sequence to past verbs)
ed spellings confined to past verbs, with
generalizations to irregular verbs
ed spellings confined to regular past verbs:
no generalizations
Unclassified
The main criterion for Stage 3—the stage when children
begin to produce the ed spelling without understanding its grammatical basis—was that the child should write at least three ed
endings and that at least one of these should take the form of a
grammatically inappropriate generalization to nonverbs. Again
the children also had to write at least half of the irregular verb
and nonverb endings correctly. It was in principle possible that
children selected in this way for Stage 3 (or for Stages 4 and
5) could make many phonetic transcriptions of regular verbs as
well. Tn practice this hardly ever happened, but our view was
that any child who wrote three or more ed endings had begun
to realize that there were other ways of spelling the ending than
simply through letter-sound correspondences.
Our joint criterion for Stages 4 and 5 was still that the children
should write at least half of the irregular verb and nonverb
endings correctly and that they should produce at least three ed
spellings but that these ed% should be just at the ends of past
verbs.
Stage 4 children generalized the ending to irregular verbs at
least once but never to nonverbs. Stage 5 children wrote ed with
regular past verbs only.
We allocated the children to stages in this way in all three
sessions. Table 4 gives the number of children falling into the
five stages in the three sessions, together with their ages and
their reading ages in Sessions A and C. The table shows that the
stage model successfully included the vast majority of children
(more than 90% in each phase). The few who were excluded
in each case were children who did quite well in spelling the
endings of irregular verbs and nonverbs but hardly ever produced
the ed spelling and made very few phonetic transcriptions with
regular verbs. Our model does not account for this pattern, but
the pattern is rare and may be even rarer than Table 4 suggests.2
The Test of the Model
Any stage model should pass at least three tests. One is that
all, or very nearly all, the children should clearly belong to one
of the stages in each session; we have already shown this to be
B
C
kist slept soft
58
78
53
63
15
29
kissed sleped sofed
86
67
71
kissed sleped soft
52
57
65
kissed slept soft
63
82
112
26
12
10
true of our model (Table 4 ) . Second, the developmental stages
should be related to external criteria: The children at more advanced stages should be the older or the educationally more
successful children in the sample. The third test is the most
stringent and unfortunately the least often applied. Because the
stages are ordered from less to more advanced, over time individual children should move in one direction hut not in the
other. If a child is at Stage 2 in one session, the model predicts
that he or she will be either at Stage 2 or at Stages 3, 4, or 5
in the next session but not at Stage 1.
Table 4 shows that the model is related to external criteria in
the way that we predicted. The average ages and reading ages
of the children in the higher stages were greater than those of
children at a less advanced stage according to our model. Spear-
2
Because /d/ and ill are a voiced-voiceless pair of sounds, it seemed
possible that the children might confuse them (e.g., by writing kepd or
grount). However when we looked at these confusions we found that
they were relatively infrequent and occurred for the most part with words
ending in /t/. This asymmetry between writing d for III and writing /
for /d/ was very striking: 82% of the d~t confusions in Session A took
the form of children writing d for III and only 18% of writing t for
idl. This suggests that most of these mistakes are not genuine voicedvoiceless confusions but arise from the child realizing that past verbs
commonly end in d but not taking in the full ed spelling sequence. But
we cannot say which mistakes take this form and which have other
causes, and for this reason we decided to treat all such mistakes as
errors and not to analyze them in any other way. This meant that we
only counted d spellings as phonetic transcriptions of regular verbs with
a /d/ ending and t spellings as phonetic transcriptions with regular
verbs with a Itl ending. Thus opend and kisst were counted as phonetic
transcriptions, but not opent or kissd. Several children who were unclassified in our stage model would have been classified as Stage 2 if we
had counted all ds and fs as phonetic transcriptions of the endings of
regular verbs. In this case, 17 of the 26 children whom we could not
fit in our stage model in Session A would have been in Stage 2. In
Sessions B and C, the figures are 9 out of 12 and 3 out of 10, respectively.
So the figures in Table 4 may be an underestimate of the proportion of
children whose scores fit our stage model.
MORPHOLOGICAL SPELLING STRATEGIES
643
Table 4
Mean Ages and Reading Ages for the Five Stage Groups in Sessions A, B, and C
Session A
Stage
Session B
n
Age
Reading age
n
Age
M
SD
58
7y Om
10.5
6y 8m
8.1
38
7y 7m
11.2
M
SD
78
7y 2m
9.0
7y 2m
8.7
63
M
SD
86
7y 9m
10.1
8y 6m
11.7
M
SD
52
8y Om
M
SD
63
Session C
Age
Reading age
15
8y 9m
10.0
7y 9m
25.1
7y 8m
10.0
29
8y 10m
10.2
7y 10m
16.0
67
8y 2m
9.2
71
9y 0m
10.2
9y 3m
18.1
8y llm
4.5
57
8y 5m
10.1
65
9y 4m
10.6
lOy Om
9.7
9y 7m
4.6
82
8y 5m
10.3
112
9y 7m
10.3
lly 4m
17.8
n
1
•
8.4
8y lm
10.2
Note. Mean ages are given in years (y) and months (m), and standard deviations are given in months.
man correlations between the children's stages and their ages
were significant in Sessions A ( r - .45, p < .001), B (r - .34,
p < . 0 0 1 ) , a n d C ( r = .32,p < .001). The correlations between
the children's stages and their reading age were even stronger:
They were 0.77 (p < .001) in Session A and 0.61 (p < .001)
in Session C. The children's stages were still closely related to
their reading age in partial correlations, which controlled for
differences in age ( r = .66, p < .001, in Session A and r =
.52, p < .001 in Session C ) .
The pattern of the children's correct spellings and of their
spelling mistakes fit the model. This pattern was much the same
in all three sessions. Table 5 shows that the pattern for Sessions
A and C (for the sake of brevity we have omitted the Session
B scores) confirms that in each of the sessions the children in
Stage 1 hardly ever produced the correct ending to any of the
words. In Stage 2 the children hardly ever produced the ed
spelling but did spell the endings of the irregular verbs and
nonverbs relatively well. These children wrote many phonetic
transcriptions of the regular verb endings, and in fact the number
of their incorrect phonetic transcriptions with regular verbs almost equalled the number of their correct phonetic transcriptions
of irregular verb and nonverb endings. Thus they did not distinguish regular verbs from irregular verbs or nonverbs.
The transition from Stage 2 to Stage 3 contains the most
striking changes in spelling. Stage 3 children made far fewer
phonetic transcriptions with regular verbs than Stage 2 children
did (a change from a mean of 7.04 to 2.24 in Session A ) , and
they produced many ed spellings (a change from a mean of
0.24 with regular verbs to one of 6.69 in Session A ) . Some of
the eds written by the Stage 3 children were incorrect generalizations to irregular verbs and to nonverbs. These generalizations
indicate that the children had not fully learned the grammatical
basis for the spelling. However it should be noted that they
wrote more eds with regular verbs than with the other two kinds
of word. This may be because they had a partial knowledge of
the grammar involved or that they had specific memories for
particular past verbs.
The Stage 4 children produced much the same patterns as the
Stage 3 children, except that, by definition, the Stage 4 children
made no generalizations to nonverbs. The Stage 5 children were
also similar except that they, again by definition, made neither
kind of generalization.
We carried out separate analyses of covariance of the correct
spellings in each session; the main terms were stages and word
type (regular verbs, irregular verbs, and nonverbs) and IQ was
the covariate. We used IQ as the covariate because we wanted
to rule out the possibility that any differences between the stage
groups were just an artifact of the groups having different mean
IQs. We did not use reading age as a covariate because, according to our model, the children's reading level is partly the
product of the development that we are tracking in our stage
model. In fact, we used correlations between reading age and
stages as a test of the validity of our stage model. Thus reading
age is an integral part of our independent variable, stages, and
to partial out reading age would be to tamper with the effect of
this particular independent variable.
The analyses established significant differences between
stages, F(4, 309) = 289.1 in Session A, F(4, 302) = 345.4 in
Session B, and F ( 4 , 282) = 172.6 in Session C, and also an
interaction between stages and word type in each session, F(4,
309) = 289.1 in Session A, F ( 4 , 3 0 2 ) = 345.4 in Session B, and
F(4, 282) = 172.6 in Session C. lukey's honestly significant
difference posttests showed that the interaction was caused by
the same pattern in each session. The Stage 3, 4, and 5 children
were significantly better than the Stage 1 and 2 children with
regular verbs, and the Stage 2, 3, 4, and 5 children were significantly better than the Stage 1 children with irregular verbs and
with nonverbs.
Another interesting pattern was a consistent difference between Stage 3 and Stage 4 children. TUkey posttests showed
that, in each session, the Stage 4 children were significantly
better with nonverb than with irregular verb endings (though
both are spelled phonetically) whereas this was not true of the
Stage 3 children. This is entirely consistent with our stage model
644
NUNES, BRYANT, AND BINDMAN
Table 5
Mean Correct and Incorrect Spelling Scores for Verb and Nonverb Endings By the Five
Stage Groups in Sessions A and C
Stage
Correct
regular
verbs
Correct
irregular
verbs
Correct
nonverbs
Phonetic
transcriptions
of regular verbs
eds on
irregular
verbs
eds on
nonverbs
Session A
1
M
SD
0.74
1,98
2.17
1.45
1.86
1.81
1.38
1.77
0.38
1.25
0.28
0.95
M
SD
0.24
0.43
8.12
1.53
8.13
1.52
7.04
1.45
0.06
0.25
0.10
0.35
M
SD
6.69
2.38
7.45
1.81
7.80
1.17
2.24
1.83
1.87
1.55
1.60
0.82
M
SD
6.96
2.46
7.81
1.34
9.17
1.22
2.23
1.93
1.42
0,75
M
SD
7.29
2.18
9.73
0.65
9.71
0.49
1.92
1.68
••)
L
i
J
A
H
J
Session C
1
M
SD
1.67
2.77
2.33
1.35
2.87
1.81
1.93
1.75
0.20
1.15
1.00
1.65
M
SD
0.45
0.69
8.41
1.52
8.31
1.65
6.72
1.36
0.10
0.41
0.14
0.35
M
SD
6.63
2.40
8.00
1.58
7.87
1.82
2.25
1.93
1.41
1.28
1.56
0.89
M
SD
6.89
2.22
7.88
1.52
9.21
0.99
1.82
1.52
1.37
0.65
M
SD
8.17
1.66
9.91
0.29
9.84
0.51
1.49
1.45
L
-i
j
A
H
J
because it suggests that the Stage 4 children had made a distinction between the spelling of nonverbs and verbs but were still
unsure about the distinction between regular and irregular verbs.
We also analyzed the children's phonetic transcriptions in
separate one-way analyses of covariance for each session—
here the main term was stages and the covariate was IQ. Each
analysis produced a significant difference between stages; F(4,
309) = 126.2 in Session A, F(4, 302) = 304.0 in Session B,
and F(4, 282) = 150.6 in Session C, p < .001 in each case.
We did not look at ed generalizations in analyses of variance
because their distribution was not normal. Instead we carried
out logistic analyses of both kinds of error in each of the three
sessions separately. In each logistic analysis, the dichotomous
dependent variable was whether or not the child ever made the
generalization in question in that session. We entered age, and
then IQ, as the first two steps in all these analyses to control
for differences in these variables. (We entered IQ and not reading age, for exactly the same reason that we chose IQ as a
covariate in the analyses of covariance.) The third and final step
in each analysis was the difference between stage groups. In
the analyses of the generalizations to irregular verbs we entered
the scores for the children in Stages 1-4, and in those of the
generalizations to nonverbs we entered the scores of the children
in Stages 1-3 only. This was because by definition the children
in Stage 5 made no generalizations to irregular verbs and the
children in Stages 4 and 5 made none to nonverbs.
There were significant differences between stages in all six
logistic analyses. In the analyses in which the outcome measure
was generalizations to irregular verbs, x 2 ( 3 , N = 363) = 149.5,
p < .001, in Session A; x a ( 3 , N = 336) = 144.5, p < .001,
in Session B; and x 2 ( 3 , N = 304) = 93.5, p < .001, in Session
C. In the analyses in which the outcome measure was generalizations to nonverbs, x 2 ( 2 , N - 363) - 180.8,/> < .001, in Session
A; x 2 ( 2 , N = 336) = 151.7,/> < .001, in Session B; and x 2 ( 2 ,
N - 304) = 87.7, p < .001, in Session C. Thus, these analyses
confirm that children in the different stage groups differ radically in the number of generalizations even after the effects of
differences in age and IQ have been removed.
The analyses of the correct scores, the phonetic transcriptions
of regular verb endings and the generalizations of ed therefore
support our selection criteria for the stages. The next test of the
model was the longitudinal one. We wanted to know whether
MORPHOLOGICAL SPELLING STRATEGIES
the children would progress, and not regress, over time. Tables
6 and 7 present data about the relative position of individual
children in successive sessions. Table 6 concerns their stages in
Sessions A and B, and Table 7 in Sessions B and C. The tables
show how many children stayed at the same stage in the two
sessions (these children are represented by the top left to bottom
right diagonal in both tables), how many progressed to a higher
stage (children above the diagonal) and how many were at a
lower stage, according to our model, in the later session (below
the diagonal). Our prediction was that the vast majority of the
children should either be on the diagonal or above it, and that
few should be below it.
This prediction was largely successful. There were backsliders, but they were clearly in the minority. More children
advanced to a higher stage (in our model) than regressed to a
lower one. Some children advanced by more than one stage
from session to session: 26% of those at Stages 1, 2, or 3 in
Session A were two or more stages higher in Session B than in
Session A, and 54% of those in Stages 1, 2, or 3 in Session B
were two or more stages higher in Session C. We do not see
this as negative evidence. Although our model states that each
child goes through all five stages it is quite possible that particular children could have progressed through more than one stage
during the considerable interval between sessions.
The existence of backsliders is a problem for our model,
particularly given the size of the gap in time between sessions.
Most backsliders were in Stages 4 or 5 in the first of the two
sessions being compared. In the Session A - B comparison, 29%
of the children who were in Stages 4 and 5 at the outset had
fallen back a stage or more by Session B. The equivalent figure
for the Session B - C comparisons was 22%. We cannot offer a
full explanation for these backsliders, and their development
needs further investigation. Preliminary analysis shows that
these backsliders had relatively low standardized reading scores
in Session A and C compared with the children who did not
backslide. We are pursuing the hypothesis that the backsliders
initially make normal progress in their understanding of the
conventional spelling of morphemes but later, as a result of
inadequate and unsuccessful experience in reading, lose confidence in the grammatical understanding that they used to have.
Until we have further evidence for this hypothesis, we must
Table 6
Relative Position in Spelling Stages of Individual Children in
Successive Sessions A and B
Stage in Session B
Stage in
Session A
1
2
3
4
5
Total
1
2
3
28
5
0
0
0
33
11
43
3
1
1
59
8
10
30
It
3
62
4
1
5
21
13
11
51
5
Total
1
6
19
17
49
69
73
42
52
285
37
80
Afore. The figures in bold are the numbers of children who stayed in
the same stage across the two sessions.
645
Table 7
Relative Position in Spelling Stages of Individual
Children in Sessions B and C
Stage in Session C
Stage in
Session B
1
2
3
4
5
1
2
3
9
2
7
16
1
0
0
24
9
15
26
14
5
69
1
0
1
Total
13
4
5
5
16
0
8
14
15
7
57
19
23
56
106
Total
30
57
61
52
69
269
Note. The figures in bold are the numbers of children who stayed in
the same stage across the two sessions.
acknowledge that our stage model provides no explanation for
the backsliders.
It should also be noted that many children stayed at the same
position in Session B as in Session A: Over half of those in
Stages 1 and 2 in Session A were in the same stage in Session
B. However, there was much more mobility between Sessions
B and C when the children were older. This result suggests that
spelling development is slow at first but becomes more rapid
later on.
Despite the backsliders, our developmental model provides a
reasonable fit for the longitudinal data. This allowed us to look
for causes of this five-stage development.
Grammatical Awareness and the Stage Model
The developmental model suggests that children progress first
by noticing the exceptions to letter-sound rules and later by
realizing that these apparent exceptions have a grammatical rationale. This is certainly in line with the idea that children's
progress is determined by the experiences that they have in
reading and spelling. However, the data do not completely exclude the alternative hypothesis, mentioned earlier, that the extent of their grammatical awareness determines the progress of
children's spelling.
We looked first at the relations between grammatical awareness and the five stages. Table 8 gives the Session A grammatical
task scores of the children whom we assigned to the five stage
groups in Sessions A, B, and C. This shows a clear relationship
between the children's scores in the grammatical tasks in Session A and the stages to which they were assigned in that session
and later in Sessions B and C. The children in the higher spelling
stages also did better in the grammatical tasks. The grammatical
scores appear to predict stage membership not only at the time
but over the next 2 years.
In the analysis of this relationship we could not treat the
stages as a linear, continuous variable, and so we used discriminant function analysis to determine how well each of the three
awareness tests predicted the membership of the five stage
groups. In each analysis, we entered three steps in a fixed order:
age, IQ (to make sure that any relationship between grammatical
awareness and the stages was not just an artifact due to both
variables being related to differences in age or in intelligence),
646
NUNES, BRYANT, AND BINDMAN
Table 8
The Mean Correct Scores Made in the Session A Grammatical Tasks in Terms of the
Membership of the Different Stage Groups in the Three Sessions
Mean correct grammatical awareness score in Session A
Sentence
analogy
(out of 8)
Stage
M
Productive
morphology
(out of 10)
Word
analogy
(out of 8)
SD
M
M
SD
1.31
1.47
1.55
1.63
1.62
3.78
4.41
4.97
5.15
6.30
1.82
1.81
1.96
2.49
2.23
1.29
1.34
1.56
1.67
1.69
4.23
4.37
4.44
5.00
5.88
1.94
1.88
1.96
2.07
2.49
0.95
1.07
1.64
1.42
1.70
4.53
4.43
4.26
4.49
5.63
1.41
1.62
1.99
1.96
2.30
Session A
1
2
3
4
5
1.67
2.83
3.84
4.65
5.07
1.76
2.13
2.15
2.22
2.04
1.03
1.44
2.27
2.62
3.08
Session B
1
2
3
4
5
2.55
2.76
3.25
4.26
4.72
2.26
2.27
2.24
2.36
1.93
1.79
2.08
2.71
3.46
4.64
1.81
1.97
2.17
2.32
2.14
1.42
1.25
2.18
2.52
2.89
Session C
1
2
3
4
5
0.85
1.21
1.72
2.02
2.57
Note, The mean correct scores show how the grammatical scores predict membership of the stage groups
at the time (Session A) and in the two later sessions (B and C).
and then one of the Session A grammatical awareness scores.
As in earlier analyses, we did not enter reading age because in
our model the stage development is an integral part of reading
development, and therefore will be strongly reflected in the children's reading ages. We carried out the analyses separately for
Sessions A, B, and C. Thus there were nine analyses in all (three
grammatical tests in Session A, stage groups in Sessions A, B,
andC).
In all the analyses, only one discriminant function was significant, and Age and IQ were always significantly related to
this function. In the analyses that dealt with the stages assigned
to children in Session A, both the sentence analogy (Wilks' A
= .588; p < .001) and the word analogy scores (Wilks' A =
.593; p < .001) were also significantly related to this function
but the productive morphology was not. In the analyses that
dealt with the stages in Session B, the sentence analogy (Wilks'
A = .721; p < .001) and the word analogy scores (Wilks' A
— .710; p < .001) were again significantly related to the first
discriminant function, but productive morphology was not. Finally, in the analyses that dealt with the stages in Session C,
the sentence analogy scores (Wilks' A - .757; p < .001), but
not the other two grammatical scores, were significantly related
to the first discriminant function.
It is worth noting that in each case when a grammatical score
was significantly related to the first discriminant function, that
relationship was entirely orderly as far as the canonical discrimi-
nant functions evaluated at group means were concerned. The
higher the stage group, the greater was the canonical function:
The canonical functions were always negative for Stage Groups
1 and 2, around zero for Stage 3, and positive for Stages 4
and 5.
Thus these analyses showed a close relationship between the
sentence analogy and word analogy scores and the stages that
we assigned to the children both at the time that we gave the
analogy tests and in subsequent sessions, even after controls for
differences in age and IQ. The sentence analogy test successfully
predicted the membership of the stage groups over a 2-year
period. On the other hand, we found no significant relation
between the productive morphology scores and the stages.
Grammatical Awareness and the Correct Use of ed
Having established a link between grammatical awareness
and the sequence of stages, we then turned to a continuous
outcome measure. This was the correct use of eds in regular
verbs. We have two reasons for using this outcome measure.
First, as we have seen, correct eds increase across the stages:
Stages 1 and 2 children hardly ever produce the ed ending correctly and then there is a marked increase in this kind of spelling
from Stage 3 onwards. The consistent and appropriate use of
eds is the most obvious end-point of our stage model. Second,
even if the stage model were not right, we would still need to
MORPHOLOGICAL SPELLING STRATEGIES
know whether grammatical awareness is related to children's
correct use of the conventional spelling for the inflectional
morpheme.
We shall report the results of two multiple regressions. Their
purpose was to see if Session A measures of grammatical awareness predicted the children's correct ed spelling later on in
Sessions B in one regression, and in Session C in the other
regression. In each regression we controlled first for variables
that we considered to be extraneous. We wanted to rule out the
possibility that any relation between grammatical awareness and
spelling later on could be due to differences in age or IQ or the
child's original spelling ability at the time of the first session.
So we entered the steps in each regression in a fixed order and
we entered the three extraneous variables first. We entered age
and IQ, but not reading age, in these analyses for the same
reasons as in the analyses of covariance and in the discriminant
function analyses.
The first step was the children's ages, the second their IQ
score, and the third a measure of their spelling level in Session
A, which was the total correct spellings of the endings of irregular verbs and nonverbs. We included this third step because we
wanted to eliminate the possibility that any connection between
the children's grammatical awareness scores in Session A and
their later spelling was a function of their spelling level in Session A. This measure reflects the children's use of phonetic
strategies in spelling, By controlling for this aspect of spelling
we could see whether one form of spelling (phonetic) predicts
another (morphemic), and whether the children's grammatical
awareness predicts the accurate use of ed s even after controls for
differences in children's initial success in spelling phonetically.
The next three steps in each regression were the word analogy,
sentence analogy, and productive morphology scores in that order. We used this order because preliminary analyses established
that word analogy scores accounted for more variance in later
ed spelling than the sentence analogy scores did, and in turn the
sentence analogy scores accounted for more than the productive
morphology scores did.
Table 9 shows that both the word analogy scores and the
sentence analogy scores in Session A were significant predictors
of the children's success with eds in Session B, despite the
stringent controls for differences in age, IQ, and the children's
initial spelling levels. The word analogy task was also a significant predictor of correct ed spelling in Session C. These results
confirm the existence of a strong link between the children's
647
initial grammatical awareness as measured by the analogy tasks
and their subsequent success in learning that they should use
the conventional ed spelling at the end of regular past verbs.
Discussion
Our study demonstrated that there are very marked changes
between the ages of 6 and 10 years in children's ability to
adopt the conventional spellings for morphemes. The study also
established for the first time the existence of a phenomenon of
great interest: Many children generalize the conventional spelling for the ed morpheme not only to irregular verbs but also to
words in different grammatical categories.
These generalizations are at the heart of our new model of
the development of spelling. This proposes that a child's first
step in spelling is to adopt a phonetic spelling strategy; the next
step is to notice and to try to incorporate exceptions to these
rules but without a complete understanding of their grammatical
basis; the next step is to understand fully this grammatical basis
for some of the spelling patterns that do not fit well with the
letter-sound rules; and the final step is to learn about the exceptions to the grammatically based rules. Our results support this
stage model on the whole, despite the fact that the longitudinal
data showed that some children went backward rather than forward along our hypothesised developmental path. Most children,
however, did progress in the right direction.
The sequence of adopting a simpler strategy at first and accounting for exceptions later on, observed here in children's
spelling, was also found by Karmiloff-Smith and Inhelder
(1974/1975) in a study of children's understanding of how
to balance blocks on a beam. They suggested that children's
overgeneralizations might be best viewed as a creative simplification: By ignoring some aspects of the situation, young children are able to find a unifying principle that allows them to
understand the problem.
The decline in the number of phonetic transcriptions of regular verb endings and the simultaneous increase in the use of the
ed spelling pattern between Stages 2 and 3 was striking. Our
hypothesis is that this is due to the children beginning to understand that there are systematic exceptions to phonetically based
letter-sound rules and later to a growing understanding of the
grammatical basis for these exceptions, but we cannot yet rule
out the possibility that more than one step is involved in this
obviously major transformation.
Table 9
Multiple Regressions in Which the Outcome Measure was the Number of Correct ed Spellings in Sessions B or C
Correct eds in Session B
Outcome measure
At2
B
SEB
Age
IQ
Spelling level in Session A
Word analogy
Sentence analogy
Productive morphology
.138***
.123
.064
.053
.493
.178
.021
.018
.010
.489
.193
.088
.091
*p < .05.
***/? < .001.
.080***
.040***
.009*
.000
Correct eds in Session C
.371
.334
.254
.226
.117
.013
Ar2
B
SEB
.074***
.132***
.108***
.015*
.001
.000
.081
.062
.225
.273
.067
-.007
mi
.009
.034
.111
.087
.088
.271
.363
.381
.136
.048
-.005
648
NUNES, BBXANT; AND BINDMAN
Our hypothesis also explains the children's generalizations.
At first the children generalize the ed spelling to nonverbs as
well as to irregular verbs but later only to irregular verbs. Some
children actually misspell words that they spelled correctly earlier on by generalizing the ed pattern, but once again this simplification indicates progress. The children who spell slept as
sleped but realize that the ed ending is inappropriate for nonverbs have taken a major step toward using morphologically
based spelling strategies.
As well as providing the basic evidence for our developmental
model, these generalizations also suggest that some of the factors
that control the course and the rate of the development of spelling are internal to the experiences that children have in learning
to read and to write. Children first adopt new spellings like ed
because they register that there are exceptions to letter-sound
correspondence principles. Later, through experience with these
spelling sequences, they come to realize that they are connected
to a particular grammatical category.
At first sight, our demonstration of these generalizations does
not fit well with some of the results of the study by Treiman
(1993), who reports that she did not find ed generalizations to
nonverbs and that generalizations to irregular verbs were very
scarce. However, the children in her study were all in their first
year at school and were probably all still at the phonetic stage.
In our study even the youngest children had been in school for
over a year at the time of the first tests, and a large number of
them had gone beyond that stage. The number of eds that children wrote in Treiman's study, even with regular past verbs, was
very small. Only 12% of regular verbs were spelled in that way
in her study, whereas the equivalent figure for the 6-year-olds in
the first session of our study was 23%. Another possible factor
may be that the teacher of the children in Treiman's study encouraged her pupils to recognize words as wholes rather than
to segment them in any way, which probably led the children
to remember how specific words are spelled in a rote fashion—
a procedure that would certainly discourage generalization.
We should also consider the fact that we used a list that
contained many regular verbs, whereas Treiman's (1993) data
came from children's free writing. It seems unlikely to us that
this could have been a reason for the difference in results. We
have shown why it is unlikely that the nature of our list artificially promoted the ed generalizations, and this difference would
not explain why, for example, children at first make these generalizations to nonverbs as well as to irregular verbs and later
only to irregular verbs.
Our results suggest that the children's general awareness of
grammatical distinctions also plays a part in their readiness
to learn about grammatically based spelling patterns. The two
awareness tasks based on analogy were good predictors of the
children's progress through the five stages. The sentence analogy
task predicted children's position in the five stages well, and
the word analogy task was the best predictor in the multiple
regression analyses, although undoubtedly its superiority here
was partly due to it being entered as the first of the grammatical
tests in the fixed order of steps. In contrast, the productive
morphology test did not make any significant predictions either
in the discriminant analyses or in the multiple regressions. The
reason for this difference may be the level of awareness that is
needed for the different tasks. In the two analogy tasks the child
has to recognize a grammatical relation between two words or
sentences and then has to apply that relation to different words
or sentences. In the productive morphology task, on the other
hand, the child has to use the sense of the text to transform the
grammatical status of a particular word. We argue that the former task demands a more explicit recognition of a grammatical
relation than the latter because in the former task language is
an object to which transformations are applied and not simply a
tool for communication. We suggest that children's grammatical
awareness must reach this explicit level for them to be able to
adopt a morphologically based spelling strategy. The two analogy tasks also constitute a methodological contribution because
previous morphological awareness tasks were clearly contaminated by semantic factors.
It should be noted that two of the grammatical tasks, word
analogy and productive morphology, were heterogeneous in that
they included other transformations than the transformation
from present to past verbs (or vice versa). The predictive success of the word analogy task despite this heterogeneity is interesting, but our results do not show how specific such tasks
should be. This is a subject for future research.
Our study is the first convincing demonstration that there is
a sequence in the acquisition of the phonetic and the morphological spelling strategies and that this sequence is a developmental
one. Children's use of the phonetic strategy provides some of the
experiences that lead to the acquisition of a new morphological
strategy, but this development is also aided by the development
of children's explicit grammatical awareness.
We have limited our report to the learning of one spelling
sequence. Further information about other spelling patterns and
about other languages where the same phenomenon may be
observed is still needed. Nevertheless our study has thrown light
on the development of morphological spelling strategies, which
are a matter of very great importance in the study of children's
reading and spelling.
References
Beers, C. S., & Beers, J. W. (1992). Children's spelling of English
inflectional morphology. In S. Templeton & D. R. Bear (Eds.), Development of orthographic knowledge and the foundations of literacy:
A memorial Festschrift for Edmund H. Henderson (pp. 231-252).
Hillsdale, NJ: Eribaum.
Berko, J. (1958). The child's learning of English morphology. Word,
14, 150-177.
Carroll, J., Davis, P., & Richman, B. (1971), The American heritage
word frequency book, Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Derwing, B. L., Smith, M. L., & Wiebe, G. E. (1995). On the role of
spelling in morpheme recognition: Experimental studies with children
and adults. In L. B. Feldman (Ed.), Morphological aspects of language processing (pp. 3 - 2 8 ) . Hillsdale, NJ: Eribaum.
Elbro, C. (1989). Morphological awareness in dyslexia. In C. von Euler,
I. Lundberg, & G. Lennerstrand (Eds.), Brain and reading: Structural
and functional anomalies in developmental dyslexia with special reference to hemispheric interactions, memory functions, linguistic processes and visual analysis in reading (pp. 279-291). Hampshire,
England: M Stockton Press.
Fowler, A. E., & Liberman, I. Y. (1995). The role of phonology and
orthography in morphological awareness. In L. B. feldman (Ed.),
Morphological aspects of language processing (pp. 157-188). Hillsdale, NJ: Eribaum.
649
MORPHOLOGICAL SPELLING STRATEGIES
Frith, U. (1985). Beneath the surface of developmental dyslexia. In K.
Patterson, M. Coltheart, & J. Marshall (Eds.), Surface dyslexia (pp.
301-330). London: Erlbaum.
Gombert, J.-E. (1992). Metalinguistic development. London; Harvester
Wheatsheaf.
Karmiloff-Smith, A., & Inhelder, B. (1974/1975). If you want to get
ahead, get a theory. Cognition, 3, 195-212.
Marcus, G. R, Pinker, S., Ulhnan, M., Hollander, M., Rosen, J. T. J., &
Xur F. (1992). Overregularization in language acquisition. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 57 (4,
Serial No. 228).
Marsh, G., Friedman, M. P., Welch, V., & Desberg, P. (1980). The
development of strategies in spelling. In U. Frith (Ed.), Cognitive
processes in spelling (pp. 339-353). London: Academic Press.
Nunes Carraher, X (1985). Exploracoes sobre o desenvolvimento da
competencia em ortografia em portugue [Exploring the development
of spelling in Portuguese]. Psicologia, Teoria e Pesquisa, 1, 2 6 9 285.
Piaget, J., Montangero, J., & Billeter, J. (1977). Les correlats [Corre-
lates]. In J. Piaget (Ed.), L'Abstraction reflechissante [Reflective Abstractor]. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Read, C. (1986). Children's creative spelling London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul.
Schonell, F., & Goodacre, E. (1971). The psychology of teaching reading. London: Oliver & Boyd.
Sternberg, R. J. (1977). Component processes in analogical reasoning.
Psychological Review, 84, 353-378.
Tbtereau, C.,Thevenin, M.-G., & Fayol, M. (in press). The development
of the understanding of number morphology in French. In C. Perfetti,
L. Rieben, & M. Fayol (Eds.), Learning to spell. Hillsdale, NJ:
Erlbaum.
Treiman, R. (1993). Beginning to spell. New "ibrk: Oxford University
Press.
Treiman, R., Cassar, M., & Zukowski, A. (1994). What types of linguistic information do children use in spelling? The case of flaps. Child
Development, 65, 1318-1337.
Wechsler, D. (1977). Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children—Revised. New York: Psychological Corporation.
Appendix •
Material in the Grammatical Awareness Tasks
C. Productive Morphology Task
A. Sentence Analogy Task
1. Tom helps Mary. Tom helped Mary. Tbm sees Mary.,
2. Bob gives the ball to Anne. Bob gave the ball to Anne. Bob sings
a song to Anne.
3. Jane threw the ball. Jane throws the ball. Jane kicked the
ball
4 . 1 felt happy. I feel happy. I was ill
5. The dog is scratching the chair. The dog scratched the chair. The
dog is chasing the cat.
6. Bob is turning the television on. Bob turned the television on. Bob
is plugging the kettle in
7. The cow woke up. The cow wakes up. The cow ran
away.
8. She kept her toys in a box. She keeps her toys in a box. She hung
her washing on a line
B. Word Analogy Task
1. anger
strength
4. walk
shake
7. work
write
angry
walked
worker
2. sing
live
5. see
dance
8. cried
drew
song
cry
3. teacher
writer
6. happy
high
taught
happiness
1. This is a person who knows how to snig. He is snigging onto his
chair. He did the same thing yesterday. What did he do yesterday?
Yesterday he
2. This is a person who knows how to mab along the street. Yesterday
he mabbed along the street. Today he does the same thing. What does
he do today? Today he
along the street.
3. This person is always tigging his head. Today, as he falls to the
ground, he tigs his head. Yesterday he did the same thing. What did he
do yesterday? Yesterday he
4. Be careful said the farmer. You're always clomming on your shoelace. \bu're about to clom on it now. You
yesterday too.
5. Ever since he learned how to do it this man has been seeping his
iron bar into a knot. Yesterday he sept it into a knot. Today he will do
the same thing. What will he do today? Today he will
it into a
knot.
6. This is a zug. Now there is another one. There are two of them.
There are two
7. This is a nuz. Now there is another one. There are two of them.
There are two
8. It was a bazing day. He felt very bazed. He stuck out his hands
and shouted with
9. It was night-time and the moon was shining. He danced luggily
and smiled with lugginess. He felt very
10. When the sun shines he feels very chowy. He dances chowily and
laughs with
Received February 28, 1996
Revision received October 30, 1996
Accepted October 30, 1996 •