3 avril 2009
Marie-Josèphe Tainturier présentera "The acquisition of past-tense spelling in English in normally developing and dyslexic children: Rules or rote?"
- Intervenant : Marie-Josèphe Tainturier
- Laboratoire : School of Psychology - Bangor University
- Date prévue : 3 avril 2009 à 12h30
- Lieu : salle D32, 1er étage, bâtiment BSHM
- Titre : The acquisition of past-tense spelling in English in normally developing and dyslexic children: Rules or rote?
- Abstract : This study investigates the time-course of the acquisition of the past-tense -ed marking in spelling and whether this ability develops as a result of a progressive mastery of morphological rules, as commonly assumed. In Experiment 1, 177 6 to 14 year-old children (Years 2 to 9) spelled 3 matched lists of words in context: 10 regular past-tense verbs (e.g., called), 10 irregular past-tense verbs (e.g., told) and 10 non-verbs (e.g., bold). Consistent with Nunes, Bryant and Bindman (1997), spelling past-tense verbs was acquired in a stage-like manner. Year 2 children used a predominantly phonetic strategy (e.g., called-> cald), Year 4 children were close to ceiling and Year 3 showed an intermediary pattern including some over-generalisations (e.g., 'tolled' for the verb told, or 'bolled' for the adjective 'bold' ). But does the good performance of the Year 4 children reflect the use of rules? This question was addressed in Experiment 2 where 269 6 to 14 year-old children spelled 30 pseudo-words that were used either as nouns (the /neist/ is red, /neist/) or as verbs (e.g., he /neist/ his sweets, /neist/). If Year 4 children have indeed mastered the '-ed rule', then one would expect them to apply this rule to new words, producing answers such as "he naced" vs. "the naste". This was not the case; children did not start using context in spelling pseudo-words until age 12 (Year 7), that is 3 years after showing mastery of past-tense spelling with familiar words. This suggests that children's initial success in spelling -ed words is not so much based on an explicit awareness of morphological rules but rather on rote learning of whole-word spellings. Consistent with this interpretation, multiple regression analyses revealed that orthographic memory was a stronger predictor of the correct use of -ed in children aged 6 to 10 than morphological awareness. Time allowing, I will also present data on morphological spelling in dyslexia. We show that past-tense spelling is significantly impaired in dyslexics, even when compared to younger children matched for reading and spelling age. In addition, orthographic memory is a stronger predictor than morphological knowledge, consistent with the results obtained with normally developing children.
