1' Introduction

1
Duration awareness and morphological knowledge
predicting spelling in Finnish Annukka Lehtonen1
Peter Bryant Department of Experimental
Psychology, University of Oxford 1Now at
Department of Psychology, Washington University
in St. Louis

• 1. Introduction
• Numerous studies have shown that both phoneme
  morphological awareness predict childrens
  spelling
• We need to understand the relationships in more
  detail
• Rego Buarque (1997) Specific types of
  linguistic knowledge predict mastery of
  particular spelling patterns
• Phonemic awareness is connected to conditional
  spelling patterns based on phonology
• Syntactic awareness is connected to conditional
  spelling patterns based on morphology
• 2. We need to remember that...
• Orthographies represent different linguistic
  attributes
• E.g. phoneme duration, tone
• Orthographies involve different types of spelling
  rules
• E.g. transparent orthographies do not have
  conditional spelling rules based on morphology
• 3. Why is Finnish interesting?
• Phoneme duration differentiates between word
  meaning and is represented in spelling
• Long and short consonants and vowels are
  defined according to their duration in time
• Long phonemes are spelled with two identical
  letters, short phonemes with a single letter
• Children have to represent duration in spelling,
  a linguistic attribute that many orthographies do
  not mark

• 6. Tasks
• i) Dictation task
• Children had to spell 48 words to dictation
• Target clusters were consonant and vowel doublets
  (ss/ll/ aa/ee) vs. mixed consonant and vowel
  clusters (st/lt/ai/ei)
• Targets appeared in word stems or case
  inflections
• Comparisons
• Doublet vs. mixed cluster spelling
• Stem vs. inflection clusters
• ii) Duration awareness Oddity task
• Children had to choose the odd one of 4 words
  they heard
• Three words shared a phoneme of the same identity
  and duration
• The odd word had a phoneme of the same identity
  but of different duration
• E.g. mySSy toSSu laSSo kuuSi
• paaLu huuLi keLLo viiLa
• iii) Morphological knowledge Morphology tasks
• Times 1 and 2

• 8. Results Morphological knowledge and spelling
• 9. Summary of results
• Duration awareness is a better predictor of
  doublet than mixed cluster spelling both
  concurrently and longitudinally, although the
  difference for Time 1 concurrent predictions is
  very small
• Morphological knowledge is a slightly better
  concurrent predictor of inflection than stem
  spelling but difference is marked only at T1
• Longitudinally there are no differences between
  how well morphological knowledge predicts stem
  and inflection spelling

Longitudinal predictions
Morph. knowledge
14.1
14.0
Morph. knowledge
Stem
Inflection
16.1
6.2
Stem
7.9
Inflection
9.3
Hierarchical multiple regression 1st predictor
Age, 2nd Morphological knowledge
Longitudinal predictions
Duration awareness
20.3
0.6
Duration awareness
Doublets
Mixed
24.1
12.1
Doublets
12.1
Mixed
3.0
Hierarchical multiple regression 1st predictor
Age, 2nd Duration awareness