The timing and mechanisms of children's use of morphological information in spelling: A review of evidence from English and French

We present a review of the research on English and French children's learning of the place of morphemes in spelling. Traditional models suggest that children use morphology relatively late in their spelling careers and that the end-point of development lies in rule-based performance. In contrast, we show that (a) children are sensitive to the role of morphemes in determining spelling at a young age and (b) they do not rely (at least exclusively) on rules. We discuss the features that may account for discrepancies between studies demonstrating late versus early use of morphology and we examine the processes that children might rely on in their learning, specifically statistical learning of intra- and inter-word regularities and retrieval of item-specific representations. This proposal provides a potential explanation for how children learn about the representation of morphology in print.