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THE INVISIBLE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MORPHOPHONOLOGY AND LITERACY Catherine Dickie Dutch-British Symposium on Morphophonology in Language and Literacy Amsterdam, January 2011

PLAN


Conceptualising the relationship between language and literacy




Concretising it






morphophonology and reading morphophonology in reading

Where next?

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LANGUAGE

AND

LITERACY




The isolationist view “Writing is not language, but merely a way of recording language by means of visible marks.” (Bloomfield, 1933:21)




The synergistic view “The reciprocal character of speech and writing in a literate community makes it a synergistic system.” (Ravid & Tolchinsky, 2002: 430)

LANGUAGE

AND

LITERACY

intonation regional accent word stress etc

phonemes morphemes words etc

chapters punctuation fonts etc

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PHONOLOGY & LITERACY


Grapheme-phoneme correspondences






Phonological awareness as a predictor of reading success








mapping phonemes to graphemes aligning letters’ canonical sound-values to speech sounds

unsurprising if learning to read is an awareness-raising process (Castles & Coltheart, 2004) and only if reading is understood as decoding (Scholes, 1998)

Having a phonemically organised knowledge of the sounds of language is inextricably intertwined with being alphabetically literate

MORPHOLOGY & LITERACY


Morphological awareness






separable from phonological awareness a predictor of vocabulary knowledge (McBride-Chang et al., 2005)

Morphology in reading and spelling



morphologically complex words are decomposed with respect to semantics (Marslen-Wilson et al., 1994) and morphological/orthographic structure (McCormick et al., 2008)





darkness primes dark, but brothel doesn’t prime broth

6-8yo children’s spelling of ‘rock’ is more accurate in ‘__ed’ than in ‘__et’ (Deacon & Bryant, 2006)

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MORPHOPHONOLOGICAL ALTERNATIONS cats/dogs
talked/shouted
bomb/bombard
autumn/autumnal
atom/atomic
real/reality
electric/electricity
fanatic/fanaticism

s~z t~Id Ø~b Ø~n




c ~e i~ia k~s k~s

rebel/rebel
greenhouse/green_house


MORPHOLOGICALLY CONDITIONED STRESS SHIFTS SW = noun

WS = verb

REBel

reBEL

IMport

imPORT

PROject

proJECT

TRANSfer

transFER

fore-stress = N+N compound

end-stress = Adj+N phrase

GREENhouse

green HOUSE

HOTdog

hot DOG

STEEL warehouse

steel WAREhouse

BABy photographer

baby phoTOGrapher

Jones (1967), Ladd (1984), Vogel & Raimy (2002), Scobbie & Stuart-Smith (2006), Plag et al (2008)

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MORPHOPHONOLOGY AND READING

READING SKILLS

AND

PROSODIC SENSITIVITY (Whalley & Hansen, 2006)




Relationship between prosody and reading in typically developing 9 yr old children




Phrase-level prosody





Dee-Dee task

Word-level prosody



‘prosodic sensitivity’

PEPS-C Chunking Compound Nouns

word and nonword reading accuracy
Neale reading comprehension


reading skills

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WHALLEY & HANSEN’S MATERIALS


Phrase-level prosody “Sesame Street” DEE dee dee DEE DEE dee DEE dee

DEE dee DEE dee

dee DEE dee DEE

Cinderella

The Jungle Book

Bob the Builder

Pinocchio

Mary Poppins

The Lion King

WHALLEY & HANSEN’S MATERIALS


Word-level prosody compound

phrasal

The greenhouse is down there

The women went into the green house

The highchair is in the corner

Amy went to buy a high chair

Where is Mikey?

My key is there

chocolate_cake_and honey

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RESULTS (WHALLEY & HANSEN) The Dee-Dee task was most strongly related to reading comprehension
The compound nouns task was most strongly related to word reading (not nonword reading)





=> word-level prosodic information may support word identification





phrase-level prosody may support comprehension





by facilitating the retrieval of words from the mental lexicon by giving clues to syntactic structure

“Compound nouns” = both chocolate...cake and green+house

STUDY 1: MP & LITERACY

IN

ACQUISITION




The Hotdog Project (Dickie, 2009)




Pilot: 11 children in Scottish Year 6 (mean age 9;6)




‘hot+dog’ picture matching task (reading passages) PEPS-C Chunking Input & Output

“This is what a hot_dog looks like.”

“This is what a baby photographer looks like.”

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RESULTS


Accuracy much higher on analogous picture matching task involving segmental contrasts




MP picture matching accuracy was marginally related to Neale comprehension





not to single word decoding

PEPS-C with a handful of the children


accuracy much higher than in ‘hot+dog’ task

STUDY 2: MP

AND

LITERACY IMPAIRMENT

21 students with developmental dyslexia (Dickie et al, to appear)
Showed expected difficulty with ‘phonological awareness’ tasks relative to peers






spoonerisms, pig latin both for segment-based and stress-based tasks

Dyslexic and control groups were equally accurate in the MP picture matching task
Accuracy on the MP picture matching task was correlated with word decoding for both groups


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MORPHOPHONOLOGY IN READING

THE POETRY

OF

ALTERNATIONS

While painting the church steeple gray, The wind blew our brushes away. We said to the pastor, “We’ve had a disaster.” He calmly replied, “Let us spray.”

(Breen & Clifton, in press)

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In a voice that was piercing and treble, The serfs were inspired by a rebel. Then facing the troops, In small tight-knit groups, They let fly a volley of pebbles.

rebel SW consistent with expectation

In a voice that was piercing and treble, The leader urged peasants to rebel. Then facing the troops, In small tight-knit groups, They let fly a volley of pebbles.

rebel WS inconsistent with expectation

The infantry failed to repel The fighters who want to rebel. They're tough to persuade, As they're so well-paid, With funds from the Juarez cartel.

rebel WS consistent with expectation

The infantry failed to repel The followers of the rebel. They're tough to persuade, As they're so well-paid, With funds from the Juarez cartel.

rebel SW inconsistent with expectation

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RESULTS (BREEN & CLIFTON)


Readers experienced difficulty when they had to read a word whose stress pattern was inconsistent with the preceding context





Including in prose single sentences







ie when it was a WS word in a SW context

The brilliant abstract was accepted at the prestigious conference The brilliant abstract the best ideas from the things they read The brilliant report the best ideas from the things they read

=> Readers activate stress patterns in silent reading

IMPLICATIONS


morphophonology and literacy





spoken language skills are related to written language skills

morphophonology in literacy


non-visible information affects silent reading

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NEXT STEPS

WHEN IT CLEARLY HITS THE EYE?


For if rhythm is so integral a part of our audition, then it ought to be the case that it is hard to overlook: but the most pronounced of rhythms can escape our recognition when they’re reproduced in printing in an article or book. (Cutler, 1994: 81)

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But the selfsame text, however, may be printed as a ballad
(thus, with lines which end in rhymes), and any reader can descry
where the rhythm is, which renders this interpretation valid:
written rhythm’s only noticed when it clearly hits the eye.
But perhaps the readers’ lack of use of rhythm, as conceded,
if judiciously considered has a lesson it can teach:
it arises just because no segmentation step is needed.
Thus the role of language rhythm is in understanding speech.


(Cutler, 1994: 81)

REFERENCES Breen, M. & Clifton, C. (in press). Stress matters: Effects of anticipated lexical stress on silent reading Castles, A. & Coltheart, M. (2004). Is there a causal link from phonological awareness to success in learning to read?’ Cognition, 91: 77-111 Cutler, A. (1994). The perception of rhythm in language. Cognition, 50: 79-81 Deacon, S.H. & Bryant, P. (2006). Getting to the root: young writers’ sensitivity to the role of root morphemes in the spelling of inflected and derived words. Journal of Child Language, 33: 401-417 Dickie, C. (2009). Prosody and literacy: The relationship between children’s suprasegmental representations and reading skills. International Clinical Linguistics Conference (ICLC), Madrid, September 2009 Dickie, C., Ota, M., & Clark, A. (to appear). Revisiting the phonological deficit in dyslexia: are implicit non-orthographic representations impaired? Marslen-Wilson, W., Tyler, L.K., Waksler, R., & Older, L. (1994). Morphology and meaning in the English mental lexicon. Psychological Review, 19, 3-33 McBride-Chang, C., Wagner, R.K., Muse, A., Chow, B.W.-Y., & Shu, H. (2005). The role of morphological awareness in children’s vocabulary acquisition in English. Applied Psycholinguistics, 26: 415-435

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McCormick, S.F., Rastle, K., & Davis, M.H. (2008). Is there a ‘fete’ in ‘fetish’? Effects of orthographic opacity on morpho-orthographic segmentation in visual word recognition. Journal of Memory and Language, 58: 307-326 Plag, I., Kunter, K., Lappe, S., & Braun, M. (2008). The role of semantics, argument structure, and lexicalisation in compound stress assignment in English. Language, 84: 760-794 Ravid, D. & Tolchinsky, L. (2002). Developing linguistic literacy: a comprehensive model. Journal of Child Language, 29: 417-447 Scholes, R.J. (1998). The case against phonemic awareness. Journal of Research in Reading, 21: 177-188 Scobbie, J.M. and Stuart-Smith, J. (2006). Quasi-phonemic contrast and the fuzzy inventory: examples from Scottish English. QMU Speech Science Research Centre Working Papers, WP-8 Whalley, K. & Hansen, J. (2006). The role of prosodic sensitivity in children’s reading development. Journal of Research in Reading, 29: 288-303

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