Resumen

JAICHENCO, Virginia  y  WILSON, Maximiliano. The role of morphology in reading acquisition in Spanish. Interdisciplinaria [online]. 2013, vol.30, n.1, pp.85-99. ISSN 1668-7027.

Several studies on literacy acquisition conducted in different orthographies such as English, French, Finnish and Italian have shown that morphemes play an early role in visual word processing such as reading and lexical decision. Also, the degree of consistency or transparency between orthography and phonology in a language seems to play a role in the size of the processing units used by young readers. In scripts with highly inconsistent grapheme - phoneme correspondences such as English or French units larger than the grapheme are early used due to the unpredictability of grapheme - phoneme finer grain size mappings. Thus morpheme -and whole word- based reading are early developed by children in these languages. Conversely, in highly consistent languages like Italian or Spanish the grapheme is a reliable unit for visual word processing since almost invariably a single grapheme maps onto a single phoneme. In the acquisition of such scripts whole word reading would be developed later on. This diminished morphological effect in normal development has been explained based on the influence of larger grain size units such as whole words as children master of literacy increases. For instance, Italian developing readers have been shown to be early affected by the morphological components of a stimulus but morphology continued to affect visual word processing only in older children with reading difficulties. Thus this morphological sensitivity seems to develop early in childhood even in transparent orthographies as Italian and it has been described to continue affecting processing only in individuals with reading difficulties. However and to the best of our knowledge very few studies on the influence of morphology in Spanish children have been conducted. None of them was on the influence of morphology in visual word processing tasks such as word reading and lexical decision. That is why the aim of the present study was to obtain evidence of the role of morphology in early literacy acquisition in Spanish. Three groups of children from 2nd to 4th year of primary school participated in the study. Participants were administered a lexical decision and a reading task with high and low frequency words and: (1) morphological non-words made up of morphemes combination (root and suffix); and (2) non-morphological simple non-words. The results showed an effect of frequency in the processing of words, i.e., better processing of highly frequent words as compared to low frequency ones. The influence of a lexical variable like frequency shows that the orthographic input lexicon is also early organized in children that learn the script of a transparent language. In lexical decision morphologically complex non-words were processed with more errors than morphologically simple non-words. In other words, morphology had an inhibitory effect in lexical decision because children had a tendency to accept morphologically complex non-words as real words. This inhibitory effect is compatible with the (at least partial) morphological organization of the orthographic input lexicon. Morphological complexity had the opposite effect during reading of non-words. Morphologically complex non-words were read with fewer errors than morphologically simple non-words. This facilitator effect of morphology for reading can be explained by the fact that for efficient reading children will rely more on larger grain size units like morphemes (as compared to the slower and less efficient grapheme-phoneme based reading processes). In sum, the results of the present study provide evidence of the early organization of an orthographic lexicon that includes morphemes as representation units in Spanish. These units are used by early readers during visual word processing of new stimuli. Such morphological processing proves more useful than sub lexical grapheme-phoneme conversion processing because it deals with larger-grain units than single graphemes and phonemes.

Palabras clave : Lexical decision; Lexicon; Morphemes; Morphology.

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