The influence of orthography on past tense formation by poor readers

Abstract

© University of Groningen Press The present study compared morphophonological skills of typical and poor readers. Specifically, the role of orthography in past tense inflection of 8-to-11-year-old typical and poor readers was investigated. These groups were presented with verbs and pseudoverbs, in which the medial obstruent was provided (e.g. blaffen 'to bark'), and asked to produce a past tense. It was assessed whether children generated past tenses with the correct suffix (-te or -de), which depends on voicing of the medial obstruent. Children's sensitivity to the relationship between vowel length and voicing in Dutch past tense forms was also investigated. Finally, it was assessed whether orthographic presentation of the stimuli (coupled with the auditory presentation) lead to higher correct scores than conditions in which only the auditory version of the verb was presented. The results do not show differences between the typical and poor readers in the numbers of correctly inflected verbs. Both groups are better able to inflect existing verbs than pseudoverbs. Furthermore, both groups are sensitive to subtle phonotactic patterns, which aid past tense formation. Both groups made more errors with voiceless than voiced medial obstruents. Typical readers, however, showed better performance when the orthography was provided for existing verbs, whereas poor readers did not benefit from this information. These results show that although the morphology and phonology of poor readers does not differ from typical readers at this age, they make less use of orthographical information in the inflection task. This suggests that it is the integration between (morpho-)phonology and orthography that is difficult for poor readers, rather than phonology itself.