Morphological effects in children's spelling of French words.

The present study examined whether primary school children represent morphological information when spelling French words that have silent-consonant endings (e.g., chat). Children in grades 2 (n = 57) and 4 (n = 55) spelled regular, morphological, and deep words. The morphological and deep words differed in the presence or absence of derivatives that revealed the nature of the silent-consonant ending. As expected, regular words were the easiest to spell whereas morphological words (for which the silent consonant could be derived) were easier to spell than were deep words (for which the silent consonant must be memorized). Children's linguistic knowledge of morphology made a contribution to their spelling of morphological words that was independent of reading experience, vocabulary, spelling ability (i.e., spelling regular words), and phoneme awareness.