deaf and hearing children's plural noun spelling

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Deaf and hearing children's plural nounspellingHelen L. Breadmore a , Andrew C. Olson a & Andrea Krott aa School of Psychology, University of Birmingham , Birmingham , UKAccepted author version posted online: 27 Apr 2012.Published online: 25May 2012.

To cite this article: Helen L. Breadmore , Andrew C. Olson & Andrea Krott (2012) Deaf and hearingchildren's plural noun spelling, The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 65:11, 2169-2192, DOI:10.1080/17470218.2012.684694

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Deaf and hearing children’s plural noun spelling

Helen L. Breadmore, Andrew C. Olson, and Andrea Krott

School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK

The present study examines deaf and hearing children’s spelling of plural nouns. Severe literacyimpairments are well documented in the deaf, which are believed to be a consequence of phonologicalawareness limitations. Fifty deaf (mean chronological age 13;10 years, mean reading age 7;5 years) and50 reading-age-matched hearing children produced spellings of regular, semiregular, and irregularplural nouns in Experiment 1 and nonword plurals in Experiment 2. Deaf children performedreading-age appropriately on rule-based (regular and semiregular) plurals but were significantly lessaccurate at spelling irregular plurals. Spelling of plural nonwords and spelling error analyses revealedclear evidence for use of morphology. Deaf children used morphological generalization to a greaterdegree than their reading-age-matched hearing counterparts. Also, hearing children combined use ofphonology and morphology to guide spelling, whereas deaf children appeared to use morphologywithout phonological mediation. Therefore, use of morphology in spelling can be independent ofphonology and is available to the deaf despite limited experience with spoken language. Indeed, deafchildren appear to be learning about morphology from the orthography. Education on more complexmorphological generalization and exceptions may be highly beneficial not only for the deaf but alsofor other populations with phonological awareness limitations.

Keywords: Morphology; Deaf; Spelling; Inflection; Literacy development.

Severe literacy impairments are well documented indeaf populations. At 16, the average deaf schoolleaver has a reading age equivalent to an 8- or 9-year-old hearing child (Conrad, 1979; Powers,Gregory, & Thoutenhoofd, 1998). Since literacyis typically considered secondary to and parasiticon speech, and since problems with phonologicalawareness are strongly associated with problemslearning to read and write (Hulme, Snowling,Caravolas, & Carroll, 2005; Snowling, 2000), it is

natural that previous research has focused on therole of phonological awareness in deaf children’sliteracy attainment.

Previous studies, however, leave some doubt asto whether this is the only or even the mainfactor in deaf children’s difficulties with literacy.Single word processing, for example, can be rela-tively good. Olson and Caramazza (2004) foundthat deaf young adults (ages 16–21) spelled singlewords relatively accurately (85%) and were similar

Correspondence should be addressed to Helen L. Breadmore, Department of Psychology, University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4

7AL, UK. E-mail: [email protected]

We would like to thank Megan Davies for her help with data collection and all of the children, parents, teachers, and interpreters

involved in the research. This research was supported by a Medical Research Council (MRC) PhD studentship and Economic and

Social Research Council (ESRC) Fellowship [Grant PTA-026-27-2093] to H.B. Helen L. Breadmore is currently at the

Department of Psychology, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK.

# 2012 The Experimental Psychology Society 2169http://www.psypress.com/qjep http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2012.684694

THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY

2012, 65 (11), 2169–2192

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to hearing students of nearly the same chronologi-cal age (ages 15–18; 90% correct). This level ofaccuracy occurred despite evidence for muchweaker phonological influence (18% of deaf spel-ling errors were phonologically plausible vs. 72%of hearing errors). Other cross-sectional (Burden& Campbell, 1994; Hanson, Shankweiler, &Fischer, 1983) and longitudinal studies (Kyle &Harris, 2010) have shown the same. Importantly,however, literacy does not just involve single worddecoding. In prose reading other skills becomeimportant, for example morph-syntacticprocessing.

Here, we are interested in knowledge of mor-phology. Morphology is important for word for-mation, efficient vocabulary expansion, andintegration of word-level and syntactic knowledge.We know that native use of inflection is particularlydifficult for non-native speakers, even after exten-sive exposure to a second language (Johnson &Newport, 1989; Newport, 1990) and even whensecond-language learners have native-like exposureto the second-language phonological (or sign)system. At the same time, morphological awarenesscorrelates positively with literacy skills for bothhearing (Carlisle, 1995, 2000; Mahony, Singson,& Mann, 2000; Shankweiler et al., 1995;Singson, Mahony, & Mann, 2000) and deafreaders (Gaustad & Kelly, 2004; Waters &Doehring, 1990). Here we focus on whether deafspellers have acquired productive use of mor-phology in the domain of the English plural.

Morphology and learning to spell

Morphemes are the smallest units that systemati-cally relate groups of sounds to syntactic rolesand/or meanings (e.g., [DOG][S] contains twomorphemes: the root indicating the animal, andthe inflection indicating the number). In compre-hension and production, morphology (like phonol-ogy) composes words of smaller units and is oftenhighly productive. This makes acquiring and mana-ging a large vocabulary efficient and allows novelcombinations to be generated and understood. Inthe present study, we focus on inflectional mor-phology. As we have noted, inflectional affixes

can have a semantic function (e.g., number), butthey also encode grammatical information that isimportant at sentence level, including word classand properties subject to agreement, such astense, gender, and number.

Learning a morphological system involves learn-ing about several dimensions: awareness of mor-phological components, acquisition of the rulesunderlying regular inflections, and learning ofexceptions. Roots must be identified as referringto the same lemma (root consistency). Since inflec-tional changes are often similar in size to minimaldistinctive phonological or orthographic changes(e.g., dog/dogs; plan/plant), identifying an inflec-tion requires considering the overlap in meaningbetween words. Changes in form that have a con-sistent interpretation must be isolated and general-ized to identify regular inflections. This we refer toas awareness of morphological components andgeneralization of regular inflections. However,inflection is rarely entirely consistent. Englishinflection often has a regular inflection thatapplies to the majority of forms, but also semiregu-lar inflections that apply to a small family of similarwords and isolated exceptions (e.g., in the Englishplural there are semiregular forms knife/knives, life/lives; and exceptions sheep/sheep; mouse/mice).Semiregular forms must be recognized as a relatedfamily that is different from the regular inflectionor stored one by one as frank exceptions.Exceptions must prevent the regular inflectionfrom applying and, instead, produce a stored excep-tional form.

Accounts of morphology and spelling develop-ment can be divided into “early” accounts, whichclaim that children make use of morphology fromthe beginning of development (Deacon, Pacton,& Conrad, 2008; Pacton & Deacon, 2008;Treiman & Bourassa, 2000; Treiman & Cassar,1996), and “late” accounts, which claim that chil-dren initially apply phonological strategies indiscri-minately and then gradually integrate knowledge oforthographic constraints, including morphology(Nunes, Bryant, & Bindman, 1997a, 1997b).These accounts agree, however, that there is adevelopmental progression for learning each ofthe dimensions we have defined.

2170 THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY, 2012, 65 (11)

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Awareness of morphological componentsDeveloping an awareness ofmorphological relation-ships involves first recognizing the co-occurrence ofsystematic changes in form and meaning. In thedomain of orthography, children must recognizethat morphologically complex words are made upof several morphemes and that related words sharespellings. Root consistency is argued to occur rela-tively early (5- to 8-year-olds retain root spellings:Deacon & Bryant, 2005, 2006a, 2006b; Treiman,Cassar, & Zukowski, 1994) while suffix consistencydevelops later (around 8 to 10 years old for past tense+, ed. : Nunes et al., 1997a, 1997b).

Generalization of regular inflectionGeneralization of regular inflection (e.g., add+,s. to the root to form a plural noun) involvesproductive use of morphology. Until childrenhave firm knowledge of the exceptions, they willsometimes apply regular morphographic rules toirregular plurals. Previous research has found thatthese overgeneralization errors occur in hearingchildren’s spellings at the age examined in thepresent study. For example, Nunes et al. (1997b)found that children initially (reading age 7;2years) spelled word endings phonetically. Later(reading age 8;6 years), they used affix spellings,but in noninflected contexts, showing that childrenrecognized the units for their sounds, but not asmorphological units (e.g., “ed” spellings for non-past-tense /d/ or /t/, e.g., bird→ bired). Still later(reading age 8;11 years), they produced overgener-alization errors on irregular verbs, indicating thatthey had learned to apply morphographic rulesbut did not have solid representations of theexceptions.

When measuring children’s ability to generalize,studies of pseudoword spelling are particularlyuseful. Here, word-specific knowledge cannot beapplied—children must use either morphologicalgeneralization or analogy to real words. Beers andBeers (1992) demonstrated that 6-year-olds werehighly competent at producing root+,s. pluralnoun nonword spellings when presented with thepronunciation of the plural form (accuracy of83% for final /s/ and 85% for final /z/ plurals).Performance on the less frequent semiregular

transformations root+,es. and final ,y.→,ies. plurals was far lower.

Nunes et al. (1997a) examined children’s spel-ling of both “regular” and “irregular” past-tensepseudoverb forms and found, similar to Beers andBeers (1992), that children had generalized theregular inflection. In contrast to “regular” pseudo-words (e.g., crell/crelled), “irregular” pseudoverbs(e.g., feep/fept) had a phonological shift in theirroot—for example, analogous to hear/heard butnot jump/jumped—and should be spelled phoneti-cally, rather than with +,ed., to be consistentwith existing word patterns. Eight-year-olds usedthe regular +,ed. inflection for 60% of regularpseudoverbs, and this rose to 86% in 10-year-olds. Regular spellings of “irregular” pseudoverbsalso increased from 27% to 38% over the sameperiod. Finally, Nunes et al. (1997a) examinedwhether children were making analogies to realverbs. Children used phonetic endings for irregularpseudoverbs more frequently than for regular pseu-doverbs, regardless of whether analogies could bemade to real verbs. This showed that they distin-guished the irregular patterns. However, the ten-dency to use a phonetic ending was strongerwhen the pseudoverb was analogous to an existingirregular verb.

Nunes et al. (1997a) concluded that two mech-anisms were at play—abstract rule-based knowl-edge to support regular inflection of regularpseudoverbs and analogy. Analogies helped to pre-serve the irregular status and phonetic spellings ofrelated irregular pseudoverbs. This finding is par-ticularly striking, given that the transformationthat Nunes et al. manipulated—the presence/absence of a sound change on the root—is notexplicitly taught to children (Bryant, Nunes, &Snaith, 2000; Nunes et al., 1997a).

Learning of exceptionsAfter generalizing spelling rules for regular inflec-tions, children learn to correctly spell the excep-tions. Since irregular forms are typically irregularin both writing and speech, children may be ableto capitalize on their existing knowledge fromspeech. In the context of past-tense verbs, Nuneset al. (1997b) argued that this stage was not

THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY, 2012, 65 (11) 2171

PLURAL NOUN SPELLING

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reached until children had a reading age of around9;7 years.

Multiple influencesThe results by Nunes et al. (1997b) reveal that thespellings that children construct for any one itemmay be influenced by more than one factor, anddetermining which is operating at any given timeis not always transparent. Along these lines,Kemp and Bryant (2003) noted that although theregular plural morphographic rule is highly pro-ductive, it is not always the only way of arrivingat the correct spelling. For example, nouns endingin a voiced consonant+ /z/ are virtually alwaysspelled with a final ,s.. These items could bespelled correctly using context-sensitive phono-graphic knowledge rather than as a result of inflec-tion. Kemp and Bryant (2003) found that children(aged 6–9 years) were particularly good at existingplurals that could be spelled using either mor-phology or distributional (phonographic) knowl-edge (mean 91% correct). Accuracy was alsorelatively high on existing plurals that could onlybe spelled using morphology (73%). However,accuracy on nonwords that required morphologywas notably lower (37%). Because a high level ofaccuracy did not transfer to novel words, Kempand Bryant (2003) concluded that children’splural spellings were predominantly guided by fre-quency-based rules and word-specific knowledgerather than generalized morphological rules.

Deacon and Pacton (2006) followed up thestudy by Kemp and Bryant (2003) with adults, pre-senting words in isolation (cf. Kemp & Bryant,2003) but also in sentence contexts. This produceda more mixed picture. Like Kemp and Bryant, theyfound strong graphotactic effects (+,s. after aconsonant more likely than after a vowel).However, they also found that the more graphotac-tically ambiguous long vowel pseudowords weremore likely to be spelled using +s when theywere dictated in a sentence context than whenwords were presented in isolation. In sentencecontext it was explicit whether nonwords weresingular or plural nouns, and therefore thisfinding indicates the morphological context wasimportant.

Overall, these studies suggest thatmultiple sourcesof information can influence spellers’ choices andthat different sources of information can be used indifferent circumstances. Nevertheless, there appearsto be a relatively consistent influence of morphologythat develops over time as children shift away fromusing strictly phonetic spelling strategies.

The English plural

The present study examines productive use of themorphological system in a very simple domain:the English plural noun. Despite its simplicity,plural morphology exemplifies all the major forcesin the interaction between morphology, phonology,and orthography in English. Written English isconsidered a morphologically transparent language.Morphographic correspondence is typically reliableand consistent, even at the expense of phoneme–grapheme correspondences (e.g., for both horses/horsIz/ and lips /lIps/ add +s for the plural spel-ling; Venezky, 1967, 1970; Verhoeven & Perfetti,2003). Not only is morphology readily available inthe orthography, the importance of morphologicalconsistency is increased because English has anotoriously convoluted relationship betweensounds and letters.

Only around 28%ofmonosyllabic Englishwordscan be spelled successfully through phoneme–grapheme correspondence alone (Ziegler, Stone,& Jacobs, 1997). Phonological strategies may bethe most effective way of learning these words, butfor the remaining 72% of monosyllabic wordsadditional strategies are necessary. Since mor-phology is at least as visible in the orthography asit is evident in speech (perhaps more so), itremains a potentially important source of regularity.In our particular context here, it is also importantthat morphology is available to those who havelimited experience with spoken language and thatunderstanding ofmorphology could be independentof phonological awareness.

Turning to the specifics of the English plural,the vast majority of plural nouns are formed byadding the suffix +,s. to the root (e.g., CAT–CATS). As we have already noted, however, mor-phographic and morphophonological regularity



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can differ. In speech, the suffix has a wider varietyof realizations (including /s� z� әz/1 e.g., cat–CATS, dog–DOGS, horse–HORSES). When thesesounds occur in word-final position in nonplurals,there are a range of different spelling patterns tochoose from (e.g., nonplural final /z/ can bespelled ,z� zz� ze� se.; Kemp & Bryant,2003). Therefore, even though plural inflection isone of the earliest developing morphologicalmarkers in speech (Cazden, 1968; De Villiers &De Villiers, 1973; Mervis & Johnson, 1991) andshould be well developed by the time formal literacyinstruction begins (at 4–5 years), this does nottransfer in a direct way to spelling—children mustacquire morphological knowledge that is specificto orthography.

Like other English inflections, the plural has alarge number of regular forms, a smaller set of sub-regularities that are systematically encoded, and anumber of clearly irregular or exceptional forms.Here, we distinguish irregular and semiregularplurals. Irregular plurals are frank exceptions: trans-formations that cannot be described with referenceto a rule. The transformation either is unique (e.g.,MOUSE–MICE) or has global (but not specific)similarity to a small subgroup of nouns (e.g.,FOOT–FEET, TOOTH–TEETH, GOOSE–GEESE). In a small number of exceptions, singularand plural forms are identical (e.g., SCISSORS–SCISSORS). To spell irregular plurals correctly,word-specific knowledge is necessary to mark theword as irregular (i.e., not to apply the rule) andto learn the spelling of the exception. The correctspelling can actually typically be generatedthrough phoneme–grapheme correspondence but,particularly relevant when phonology is impaired,visual–orthographic memorization of this smallset of items may be possible.

Semiregular forms are intermediate between irre-gular and regular plurals. They describe an inflectionthat is systematic but applies to a relatively small

number of items. These include final ,ch� x�s� sh� ss� z. becoming root+,es. (e.g.,FOX–FOXES); final consonant+,y. becoming,ies. (e.g., BABY–BABIES); and final ,f� fe.becoming ,ves. (e.g., KNIFE–KNIVES).

Note that we use a slightly different definition of“irregular” from the one used byNunes et al. (1997a)mentioned above. For us, the fundamental propertyof irregular words is that they are exceptions to themorphographic rules. Some irregular plurals aremarked by a phonological shift in the root, as inNunes (1997a; e.g., foot–feet, child–children), butothers are not (the invariant plurals; e.g., sheep).Like the words in Nunes (1997a), however, all ofour irregular plurals are irregular in both speechand spelling and should be spelled phoneticallyrather than by applying morphological rules.

Deaf spelling and morphology

In the present study, we examine hearing and deafchildren’s spelling of plural nouns and pseudonounsvarying in regularity. To the extent that deaf spellersacquire productive use of the plural, they should passthrough the basic stages common to spelling acqui-sition in hearing children, with two potential excep-tions. Firstly, morphographic factors may be moreimportant, with both positive and negative out-comes. Deaf childrenmay be advantaged when gen-eralizing across orthographic forms because theyhave less interference from competing phonologicalinputs. At the same time, deaf children may be dis-advantaged when information from speech caninform spelling. Specifically, deaf children are lesslikely to form the plural in speech and then decodethe spelling using phoneme–grapheme rules andmay, therefore, be relatively poor at spelling irregularplurals that, as we have noted, are often spelledphonetically.

They might also have more trouble understand-ing how affixes and word classes go together (e.g.,

1 Some authors (e.g., Anderson, 1974; Anderson & Lightfoot, 2002) argue that there is only one underlying representation for the

morpheme /s� z� әz/, which is realized in different ways due to basic principles of English phonology including adding /ә/ betweentwo adjacent sibilants or devoicing voiced obstruents following voiceless obstruents. Nonetheless, there remains inconsistency in the

phoneme–grapheme correspondence between each phonological realization of the plural morpheme and the corresponding graphemic

realization.



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noun+,s. , verb+,ed.). In French, there isan analogue to this situation for hearing childrenbecause number markings on the noun andverb differ in spelling but not in speech ([verb]+,nt. , [noun]+,s.). Totereau, Barrouillet,and Fayol (1998) found that children (aged 7)initially applied the noun number marking indiscri-minately to their spellings of both nouns and verbs.They then learned the verb number marker andovergeneralized this morphographic rule to nouns.Finally (aged 10) they learned the circumstancesunder which they should apply both types ofmarker. What this suggests, for the deaf, is thatthey may begin to identify affixes as units andalso begin to use them to mark words that requirea morphological change, but then use an affixfrom an inappropriate word class, something thatchildren who have the phonological form to guidethem are unlikely to do. Inappropriate affix errorsindicate knowledge of morphological units andknowledge that they need to be applied to roots,but also an inappropriate association or confusionbetween the class of a word and its possible affixes.

The present study examines deaf and youngerreading-age-matched hearing children’s spellingof plural nouns (Experiment 1) and pseudonouns(Experiment 2) of varying morphographic regu-larity, considering spelling errors in addition toaccuracy. Of primary interest is evidence that thedeaf are manipulating morphological units in spel-ling. Nonetheless, since multiple strategies arelikely to be in use concurrently, we also considerevidence for phonographic processes.

Previous studies with hearing children have usedspelling-to-dictation tasks, which are not appropri-ate for use with deaf participants. Instead, we use atask where children are provided with the correctsingular spelling and are asked to generate theplural. This task differs from previous studies intwo significant ways. First, children are providedwith the orthographic representation of the singular.Secondly, children are not provided with the phono-logical representation of the plural (Nunes et al.,1997b, used an intermediate task where pseudoverbsingular spellings were provided in a contextpassage, and a dictated form was also provided). Ifchildren are able to systematically generate word

and nonword plural affixes without any represen-tation of the plural, they will be demonstrating useof morphology. The errors they make will also beinformative. If they add other (nonplural) affixes,this will be evidence that children are basing theirspellings on morphological units. If, instead, mis-spellings are orthographically, but not morphologi-cally, related words, they would be basing theirspellings on orthographic relationships. In contrastto a dictation task, the primary role of morphologyin this task is to generate a representation, not tocombine, modify, or reinforce a phoneme–grapheme mapping. This does not preclude thepossibility of conversion via speech/phonologicalrecoding but allows for amore directmorphographicroute. Nonword generation provides a particularlystrong test since word-specific knowledge is absent.

Table 1 illustrates the hypothesized patterns ofperformance predicted by the dominant influencesof morphological, phonological, or orthographicinformation. Because deaf children have attenuatedphonological awareness, it would be natural toexpect a reduction of phonological effects comparedto hearing children. This could be accompanied by alarger influence of orthographic similarity ifmorpho-logical units are not influential, or by morphologicaleffects. Errors indicating primarily orthographiccoding would include phonologically implausible,but orthographically related, changes (e.g., plate–*place). These changes may not necessarily beconcentrated on the affix position. Errors indicatingprimarily morphological coding would include over-generalizations where the regular affix is phonologi-cally implausible for the existing plural andinappropriate affixes that are not phonologicallyrelated. If deaf children show evidence of morpho-logical processing that either equals or exceedsthe evidence from reading-age-matched hearingchildren, it would suggest that morphological pro-cessing can indeed be independent of phonologyand speech.

EXPERIMENT 1

In the first experiment, deaf and reading-age-matched hearing children were given singular



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English noun spellings and produced regular, semi-regular, and irregular plurals.

Method

ParticipantsDeaf children. Fifty deaf children (32 male) from sixEnglish schools participated. Themean chronologi-cal age was 13;10 years (range 11;1 to 15;8). Readingage was measured using the NFER-Nelson GroupReading Test II Form B (Macmillan Test Unit,2000), and the mean reading age was 7;5 years(SD= 13.7 months, range 6;0 to .11; two deafchildren hit ceiling on the reading-age measure).None of the deaf children had cochlear implants orany additional special educational needs. Better earaverages (BEAs) were available for 49 participants.These children had a mean BEA of 103 dB (range70–120 dB). The remaining participant reportedprofound bilateral hearing loss. All participantswere educated using both BSL (British SignLanguage) and English.

Parents were asked to provide information abouttheir own hearing, home communication, and theage at which their child became deaf. Thirteenparents did not provide information about their

own hearing; 28 children were born to hearingparents, 7 had two deaf parents, and 2 childrenhad a deaf mother and a hearing father.Information about home communication wasmissing for 10 participants, 3 reported primarilyusing speech/lip-reading, 26 used BSL, and 11used a combination of BSL and English. Finally,information about the age at which the childbecame deaf was missing for 16 participants butall 34 remaining participants were deaf before theage of 3.

Hearing children. Fifty hearing children (20 male)were recruited from four English primary schools.These children had no known language or literacyimpairments, had normal hearing, and were mono-lingual English speakers. The hearing childrenwere reading age appropriately and were matchedindividually to the deaf children on the basis ofreading age. They had a mean chronological ageof 8;0 years (range 6;5 to 11;2) and mean readingage on the NFER-Nelson Group Reading Test IIForm B of 7;9 years (SD= 12.6 months, range6;2 to .11). Independent-samples t tests con-firmed no significant differences in the readingages or raw scores of deaf and hearing children, t

Table 1. Spelling patterns predicted by morphological, phonological, and orthographic processes, as well as the fully developed mixed system

Plural nouns Plural nonwords Errors

Example

misspellings

Morphological Regular≥semiregular.

irregular

Predicted by

morphological rules.

Overgeneralization.

Constrained by morphological units.

Inappropriate affix errors are possible.

child–*childs

tooth–*tooths

shelf–*shelfs

baby–*babyer

Phonological Irregular.

semiregular=Regular

Spelled according to

dominant phoneme–

grapheme mappings.

Less overgeneralization on irregulars.

Less constrained by morpheme

consistency.

Phonetically plausible.

tooth–*teath

horse–*horsis

leaf–*leevs

mouse–*miys

Orthographic Regular=semiregular=Irregular

Based on real-word

orthographic

neighbours.

No overgeneralization.

Errors are orthographic neighbours, not

phonologically plausible nor

constrained by morpheme consistency

—errors can occur anywhere.

deer–*beer

mouse–

*mousse

plate–*place

star–*start

Mixed (fully

developed)

Ceiling.

Regular=semiregular=irregular

Predicted by

morphological rules.

N/A



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(98)= –1.2, p= .2, and t(98)= –1.7, p= .1.Chronological-age-matched controls were notincluded because performance would have been ator near ceiling levels—the oldest hearing childrenincluded (aged 11;1 and 11;2 years, coincidentallyoverlapping with the youngest deaf childrentested) spelled 28/33 plurals correctly.

Stimuli and designThirty-three common English nouns were selectedfor plural spelling: 11 regular, 11 semiregular, and11 irregular. Regular plural transformationsinvolved adding the suffix +,s. (e.g., BOOK–BOOKS). Semiregular plurals included three differ-ent transformations: Five required addition of thesuffix +,es. (root+,es., e.g., CHURCH–

CHURCHES); three roots ended in ,y., andthe transformation changed this ending to ,ies.(final ,y., e.g., BABY–BABIES); and threeroots contained final ,f� fe., and the transform-ation changed this to ,ves. (e.g., KNIFE–KNIVES). Irregular plurals included three differenttransformations: Five nouns involved an internalchange (e.g., MAN–MEN); five were invariant,with no transformation required (e.g.,SCISSORS–SCISSORS); and one involved anunusual suffix (e.g., CHILD–CHILDREN). Afull list of stimuli is provided in Appendix A.

All words were pictureable concrete nouns.Plural and singular words were matched betweenconditions (regular, semiregular, and irregular) forword frequency (based on the CELEX database,Baayen, Piepenbrock, & van Rijn, 1993; and theChildren’s Early Reading Vocabulary, CERV,Stuart, Dixon, Masterson, & Gray, 20032) andlength (number of letters, see Appendix A).Independent-sample t tests confirmed that differ-ences between conditions were not significant (allp. .1).

Black-and-white images were obtained for allnouns from the International Picture NamingProject (see Szekely et al., 2004) or copyright freefrom the Internet. Singular images were duplicated

a random number of times to create plurals.Singular and plural pictures were placed adjacentto one another (singular on the left), with fourpairs per A4 page. Underneath each picture was adotted line. The singular spelling was providedunder the singular picture in black 22-point Arialfont. Word order was randomized.

ProcedureParticipants were tested in small groups (4–10 chil-dren). Instructions were provided on the first pageof the booklet explicitly stating that the task was tospell plurals and that “plurals are words that showthere is more than one of something . . . ”. Therewas also a completed example. To gauge the influ-ence of the type of example provided, 30 deaf and30 hearing participants were shown a regularexample (HAT–HATS), and 20 deaf and 20hearing participants were shown an irregularexample (PERSON–PEOPLE). The instructionswere reiterated verbally, with signed interpretationas appropriate. Any procedural questions wereanswered, and children were told that they mustwork alone and could not ask for help readingany of the words. Once the experimenter wascertain that the children understood the task, theycompleted the booklets at their own pace.

Results

Two analyses were conducted. The first examinedregularity and spelling accuracy to test whetherchildren had generalized morphographic rules andlearned exceptions. The second examined spellingerrors to establish whether morphological or pho-nological factors dominated.

In order to check for an effect of the type ofexample (regular, irregular) provided in the instruc-tion on spelling accuracy, we conducted an analysisof variance with regularity (regular, irregular), par-ticipant group (hearing, deaf), and example(regular, irregular) as independent variables. Themain effect of example and all interactions with

2 One regular and one semiregular plural were missing from the CERV corpus (Stuart et al., 2003). For the remaining words, inde-

pendent-samples t tests confirmed that the different levels of regularity did not differ in word frequency in their singular (p. .6) or

plural (p. .1) forms.



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example failed to reach significance [example, F(1,96)= 2.5, p= .1; Regularity×Example, F(2,192)= 0.5, p= 1.0; Participant Group×Example, F(1, 96)= 0.2, p= .7; Regularity×Example× Participant Group, F(2, 192)= 0.5,p= .6], and so the data were collapsed overexample types.

Deaf and hearing children were well matchedfor overall spelling accuracy. Deaf children pro-duced 46% (SD= 19) of their spellings correctlycompared to 45% (SD= 19) for hearing children.Reading age predicted accuracy in the deaf butchronological age did not, r(50)= .7, p, .001; r(50)= .2; p= .2, showing that reading age was anappropriate method of matching deaf and hearingchildren.

The effect of regularityFigure 1 shows deaf and hearing children’s accuracyon regular, semiregular, and irregular plurals. Asplit-plot analysis of variance (ANOVA) was con-ducted with the within-participants factor regu-larity (regular, semiregular, irregular), thebetween-participants factor participant group(deaf, hearing), and the dependent variable accuracy(percentage correct). Results showed a main effectof regularity,3 F(1.8, 177.4)= 295.2, p, .001,η2= .7; no effect of participant group, F(1, 98)=0.06, p= .8; but an interaction between participantgroup and regularity, F(2, 196)= 10.8, p, .001,η2p= .1.

Paired-samples t tests were used to explore theinteraction. Both groups were most accurate onregular plurals, but hearing children were betteron irregular than on semiregular plurals [regular.irregular, t(49)= 10.4, p, .001; irregular. semi-regular, t(49)= 4.6, p, .001], while deaf childrenwere better on semiregular than on irregular plurals[regular. semiregular, t(49)= 13.5, p, .001;semiregular. irregular, t(49)= 2.7, p= .009]. Aunivariate ANOVA on irregular plurals confirmedthat deaf children performed significantly worsethan hearing children, F(1, 98)= 12.6, p, .001,η2p= .1.

The nature of errorsNext we examined the types of errors that weremade, examining the spellings produced for irregu-lar and semiregular plurals only, since these werethe spellings that both groups of children had diffi-culty with and where all types of error could beobserved. We conducted two analyses: one of allresponses and another one that concentrated onmisspellings. For the responses analysis, spellingswere categorized as correct, omission/different word,and misspelling. A different word was scored whena participant provided a spelling that was clearlyan attempt at a word that was not the target (e.g.,*males instead of MEN). Neither hearing nor deafchildren produced omissions or different wordsvery often. Furthermore, deaf and hearing childrendid not differ in the proportion of their responsesthat were of this type. Although hearing childrenproduced numerically more correct spellings than

Figure 1. The mean effect of regularity on the spelling accuracy of

existing nouns (% correct) by deaf and hearing children in

Experiment 1 (error bars representing standard deviations).

3 Throughout this paper, when Mauchley’s Test of Sphericity indicated that the assumption of sphericity had been violated, the

more conservative Greenhouse–Geisser F-statistics and adjusted degrees of freedom are presented.



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deaf children, neither the difference in correct spel-lings nor the difference in misspellings was signifi-cant (see Table 2).

Having shown that deaf and hearing children didnot differ in the number of misspellings that theymade, the question was whether the nature of mis-spellings differed.Misspellingswere coded accordingtowhether they contained the singular root.Singular-only misspellings replicated the singular without anytransformation (note that this category does notcount invariant plurals, hence the different N; suchresponses would be correct). Singular+ plural suffixmisspellings added a plural suffix to the singularroot (+,s. or +,es., e.g., *mouses). Singular+other grapheme misspellings added other graphemesto the singular root, including adding nonplural suf-fixes (e.g., *gooseing) andpseudosuffixes (e.g., *scissors-moth). Misspellings that did not contain the singularroot were coded as other.

Table 3 indicates that hearing children madesignificantly more othermisspellings than deaf chil-dren. This is likely to result from using phoneme–grapheme correspondences to convert the irregularplural from speech. In contrast, the reduced

number of other misspellings (i.e., being morelikely to retain the root) in the deaf suggests thattheir spellings were more constrained by morpho-graphic root consistency.

Deaf children produced more singular-onlyresponses than hearing children, but the differencedid not reach significance (see Table 3).Furthermore, singular-only misspellings were veryrare and, even for the deaf, accounted for lessthan 8% of responses.

Morphological generalization predicts singular+ plural suffix misspellings. These were, by far,the most common misspelling. Furthermore, agreater proportion of deaf children’s misspellingswere singular+ plural suffix than hearing children’s(see Table 3). This means that deaf children wereovergeneralizing the regular inflection more oftenthan hearing children were.

Further evidence that deaf children, in particu-lar, recognized the component morphologicalstructure of inflected words was evident in thenature of singular+ other grapheme misspellings.Deaf children’s singular+ other grapheme misspell-ings were often made up of the root and an existing,

Table 2. Deaf and reading-age-matched hearing children’s responses to plural nouns in Experiment 1

Hearing group

Response Deaf Hearing χ2

Correct 243/1,100 (22) 272/1,100 (25) χ2(1, N= 2,200)= 2.1, p= .1

Omission/different word 40/1,100 (4) 38/1,100 (3) χ2(1, N= 2,200)= 0.1, p= .8

Misspelling 817/1,100 (74) 790/1,100 (72) χ2(1, N= 2,200)= 1.7, p= .2

Note: Percentages in parentheses.

Table 3. Deaf and reading-age-matched hearing children’s misspellings of plural nouns in Experiment 1

Response

Hearing group

Deaf Hearing χ2

Other 51/817 (6) 110/790 (14) χ2(1, N= 1,607)= 26.3, p, .001

Singular only 43/619a (7) 28/608a (5) χ2(1, N= 1,227)= 3.1, p= .079

Singular+ plural suffix 628/817 (77) 489/790 (62) χ2(1, N= 1,607)= 42.5, p, .001

Singular+ other graphemes 95/817 (12) 163/790 (21) χ2(1, N= 1,607)= 24.2, p, .001

Note: Percentages in parentheses.aDoes not count invariant plurals where singular-only responses would be correct, hence different N.



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but inappropriate, English suffix. Singular+ othergrapheme misspellings were somewhat rarer in thedeaf corpus than in the hearing corpus, but whenthey occurred they were almost always morphologi-cal. Across all plural types, 91/95 of the deaf chil-dren’s singular+ other grapheme misspellings weremorphological compared to only 74/163 of thehearing children’s; χ2(1, N= 258)= 66.1,p, .001. Deaf children’s singular+ other graphememisspellings were largely restricted to a small groupof real English suffixes from the set that are highlyproductive (+ ed� d, +er, +ers� rs, +ent, +est+ies, +ing� ings, +rens, +’s. Exceptions were:*dresse, *mousese, *toothe, *trouserse). Very few ofthese misspellings could be regarded as phonologi-cally motivated. In contrast, it was often unclearwhether hearing children’s singular+ other gra-pheme misspellings were morphological or simplyphonetically plausible renditions of the correct oroverregularized plural. In other words, hearing chil-dren’s singular+ other grapheme misspellingsseemed to result from a combination of morpho-logical and phonological sources, but deaf chil-dren’s appeared to have a strictly morphologicalsource (a complete list of misspellings categorizedas morphological and nonmorphological is pro-vided in Appendix B).

Discussion

In Experiment 1, deaf children’s overall plural spel-ling accuracy was very similar to that of reading-age-matched hearing children. However, differ-ences emerged in accuracy across levels of regularityand in error types. These differences can be relatedto the size of relative influences of phonological andmorphological information in the two groups.

Plural regularity significantly influenced accu-racy for both deaf and hearing children. Both deafand hearing children spelled regular plurals moreaccurately than semiregular or irregular plurals.This strong influence of regularity is consistentwith morphographic generalization. For manyplurals in English as a whole, both phonographicconversion and morphographic conversion wouldresult in obtaining the correct spelling (e.g., seeKemp & Bryant, 2003, p. 64 for discussion of

nouns ending in voiced consonant+ /z/).However, the vast majority of regular pluralstimuli here are unlikely to be confounded by fre-quency-based phonographic conversion. Most (7/11) of our regular plurals ended in an unvoiced con-sonant+ /s/ (and one more in unvoiced consonant+ /Iz/), and a search of CELEX (Baayen et al.,1993) revealed that for nonplurals the /s/ in finalunvoiced consonant+ /s/ combinations can bespelled ,s� x� z� se� xe.. Thus, there is nounambiguous phonographic conversion rule forthe plural ,s. in our study. Moreover, in thepresent task, children were not provided with thephonological representation of the plural. Theymust use morphology to generate the plural, evenif they go through a verbal code rather than usingmorphographic rules directly.

Differences emerged between participant groupson semiregular and irregular plurals. Deaf childrenperformed better on semiregular than on irregularplurals, whereas hearing children showed thereversed pattern. Although both groups of childrengeneralized the most common plural suffix, deafchildren had also generalized at least some of thesubregularities (semiregular plurals). Had theysimply memorized semiregular plurals, treatingthem as frank exceptions, they should have per-formed equally in semiregular and irregular con-ditions. Hearing children were actually better atspelling irregular than semiregular plurals, indicat-ing that they had learned more of the exceptions.This is consistent with them also using knowledgefrom speech and phonographic conversion. Wereturn to this difference in the General Discussion.

An analysis of error types provided particularlystrong support for morphological processing.Root change (other) misspellings were rare, indicat-ing that children understood that stems should beconserved (although note that children were giventhe spelling of the correct root). Singular+ pluralsuffix was by far the most common type of misspell-ing, reflecting morphological generalization. Deafchildren produced more of these overgeneralizationmisspellings than hearing children did.

Even deaf children’s singular+ other graphememisspellings involved almost exclusively morpho-logical units, showing that representations were



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sensitive to the morphological component structureof inflected words. Deaf children (but not hearingchildren) added highly productive English suffixes(and not simply high-frequency final graphemes)when they did not add the plural suffix. These areparticularly informative errors, because they showthat the deaf have, in some sense, categorized theset of highly productive suffixes as morphologicalcomponents. Many of these errors do not have abasis in direct experience, or orthographic similarityto real words, so they represent a productiveprocess. For example, *pennyed, *glassers, *toothed,*scissorsed are not items that our participants willhave ever seen. Moreover, errors based exclusivelyon orthographic similarity would predict a largenumber of nonmorphological other errors, such asadding high-frequency word-final letters that arenot affixes (e.g., man–*manen), or producing mor-phologically and phonologically implausible neigh-bours (e.g., skirt–*shirt); these errors were very rare.It seems that the deaf children have understood thecomponent structure of stem+ suffix, that theyhave a representation of highly productive suffixes,but that they sometimes apply the wrong suffix tothe stem. These errors are predictable if our deafspellers have morphological knowledge, but anincomplete grasp of grammatical class restrictionsfor morpheme combinations.

Evidence of phonological influences on deafchildren’s spelling was weak. Phonographic conver-sion from speech predicts comparatively good per-formance on irregular plurals where phoneme–grapheme correspondence is typically more reliable.Neither deaf nor hearing children showed thispattern in its strongest form, although the evidenceshowed that hearing children relied more heavily onphonology than deaf children did. Not only didthey perform relatively well on irregular plurals,but hearing children produced more errors thathad a combined morphological and phonologicalbasis. They produced more other errors (failing toconserve the root) and singular+ other graphememisspellings. Moreover, these misspellings oftenappeared to result from phonographic conversionfrom speech.

The differences between the deaf and hearingchildren’s spellings that we have outlined cannot

simply be due to reduced phonological informationin the deaf. Underspecified speech representationsin the deaf would predict more singular-onlyerrors (since the final phoneme is often invisiblein lip patterns). Deaf children did not produce sig-nificantly more singular-only errors than hearingchildren. Deaf children produced high rates ofoverregularization errors and added nonplural suf-fixes (which in some cases were syllable units),which is inconsistent with deaf children merelyusing different or underspecified phonology.These errors suggest that deaf children’s spellingswere not only less influenced by phonology but,crucially, were more influenced by morphology.

We found no evidence that deaf spellers usedmemory-intensive, nonproductive representationsof words, treating them as isolated wholes. Therewas clear evidence of morphological generalization,stem preservation, and stem+ suffix represen-tations. This would produce the clear advantagethat we found for regular plurals. Even semiregularplurals, which have some degree of productivity,were spelled better than irregular items. Reading-age-appropriate productive mechanisms appear tobe in place, and these should assist learning ofnew vocabulary. Morphology, therefore, does notappear to present a barrier to vocabulary acquisitionor literacy more generally. In contrast, we foundevidence that irregular words were harder for thedeaf than the hearing, indicating that these havenot yet been consolidated as items to which theregular ending does not apply.

In summary, hearing children’s plural noun spel-ling appeared to be dominated by morphographicgeneralization supported by phonographic conver-sion from speech, whereas deaf children appearedto rely more purely on morphographicgeneralization.

EXPERIMENT 2

In Experiment 2, we asked how the plural suffix isapplied to a set of novel words with the samecharacteristics as the words from Experiment1. The same participants were asked to produceplurals for nonwords. In addition, a sample of



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spellings by hearing adults was collected to charac-terize the final state of the system and to check, foreach item, which plural transformation was pre-ferred. Participants were only provided withnonword singular forms, and therefore, in ourexperimental task, nonword plurals could only begenerated using morphology. More specifically,plurals could be generated through morphographicgeneralization (add +,s.) or by analogy withknown words (and recreating the transformationto the nonword). Nonword plurals were formedby recombining the parts of the word stimuli inorder to make the words and nonwords similarand the overall results of Experiments 1 and 2more comparable. Thus, in addition to generaliz-ation of the regular +,s. plural, items ofExperiment 2 allowed us to measure the generaliz-ation of less frequent plural rules.

Method

ParticipantsThe same children as those from Experiment 1 par-ticipated in addition to 25 (12 male) hearing adults.Adults (mean age 26 years, range 18–55) werenative English speakers without any literacy,language, or hearing impairments and were highlyliterate (undergraduate or graduate students). Theperformance of the oldest hearing children (rateof spellings as predicted by morphographic rules)overlapped with that of hearing adults, so we didnot test a group of hearing children who werechronological-age matched to the deaf.

Stimuli and designThirty-three nonwords were devised by splittingeach singular noun from Experiment 1 into onset+ vowel and coda and recombining the parts(e.g., ,ba. from baby and ,rch. from churchformed ,barch.; see Appendix C for a com-plete stimulus list). All nonwords were pro-nounceable. Singular images for all nonwordswere originally items from Gauthier, James,Curby and Tarr (2003). Booklets were compiledas in Experiment 1.

There is not a correct way of inflecting non-words. However, regular and semiregular

morphographic rules were used to predict theexpected inflections. From this, we predicted that20 nonword plurals would be formed by adding,s. (henceforth root+,s.) and 6 by adding,es. (root+,es.). An adjustment to the rootwas anticipated for five stimuli; three singulars con-taining final ,f� fe. were predicted to change tofinal ,ves., and two singulars with final ,y.were expected to change to final ,ies..Behaviour was less predictable for the remainingnonwords; LASSORS and HASERS wereformed from the codas of plural invariant nouns.Attending to the final phoneme or graphemealone (/z/ or ,s.) predicts use of the semiregularrule +,es.. However, a search of the CELEXdatabase (Baayen et al., 1993) revealed that final,rs. is virtually always a plural ending (the onlyexception being mars). If participants used thecoda as the unit of analysis, they could concludethat the nonword is already pluralized (perhaps itrefers to an invariant noun) and leave it unchanged.Because of this uncertainty, these two stimuli wereeliminated from analyses.

ProcedureChildren completed the nonword plural spellingtask immediately after Experiment 1. The previousbooklet was removed prior to administration. Theprocedure was the same as that in Experiment 1except for the instructions. Full instructions wereagain provided on the booklet but verbal/signedinstructions were abridged. Children were toldthat the task was “the same as before, only this timethe words are made up . . . there is no right orwrong answer, just put whatever you think the spel-ling would be”. Similar to Experiment 1, 30 deafand 30 hearing children were given written instruc-tions that included a completed regular example(FOULK–FOULKS), whilst 20 deaf and 20hearing children were given an irregular example(FOALKE–FOULKEN).

Hearing adults were given the list of singularnonwords without pictures and were asked topretend that they were real words and produceplurals. They were provided with a completedregular example (BREW–BREWS).



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Results

Consistent with Experiment 1, we first examinedwhether responses followed the predictions andthen ran an analysis of different types of unexpectedspellings (note these were not errors because youcannot misspell a nonword). Since hearing adultsproduced only 19% of final ,f� fe. nonwordplurals as expected (far worse than all other trans-formations) and since deaf and hearing childrenvery rarely produced the expected response (deafchildren 4%, hearing children 0%), these itemswere removed from the analyses. Data from theremaining transformations were combined. As inExperiment 1, the type of example did not affectdeaf or hearing children’s performance. Deaf chil-dren produced an equal proportion of responsesas expected on the basis of morphographic rules fol-lowing a regular (483/930) or irregular example(321/620), χ2(1, N= 1,550)= 0.0, p= 1.0.Likewise, hearing children’s tendency to provideresponses as expected did not differ following aregular example (408/930) compared to an irregularexample (259/620), χ2(1, N= 1,550)= 0.7, p= .4.Therefore, the data from both example types werecombined for further analysis.

In the analysis of all responses, spellings werecategorized as expected, omission, or unexpected spel-ling. Expected responses were spelled using thetransformation predicted on the basis of the mor-phographic rule generalization. All other responsesthat were not omissions were categorized as unex-pected spellings. Hearing adults produced a signifi-cantly greater proportion of expected responsesthan deaf children who, in turn, produced morethan hearing children (see Table 4). Hearing

adults virtually always applied morphographicrules, with 93% of responses as expected. Adultsalso made significantly fewer omissions than deafand hearing children, who did not differ (seeTable 4).

Hearing adults rarely produced unexpected spel-lings (see Table 4), and therefore their data are notincluded in the analysis of unexpected spellings.Unexpected spellings were categorized in the samemanner as misspellings were in Experiment1. Spellings that did not contain the singular rootwere categorized as other. These errors were rare,and deaf and hearing children were equally likelyto produce them (see Table 5). Hearing childrenproduced significantly more singular-only responsesthan deaf children did (see Table 5). Spellings thatadded the suffix+,s� es. to the root (singular+plural suffix) were the most frequent unexpectedspellings, and deaf children produced significantlymore of these than hearing children did (see Table5). Deaf children produced significantly fewersingular+ other grapheme responses than hearingchildren did (seeTable 5).However, qualitative ana-lyses of the specific graphemes that were addedrevealed that, like in Experiment 1, a greater pro-portion of deaf than hearing children’s singular+other grapheme unexpected spellings were morpho-logical (i.e., they retained the root and added a realEnglish suffix), 86% (136/159) versus 69% (166/240); χ2(1, N= 399)= 13.9, p, .001.

Discussion

Experiment 2 supports and extends the findingsfrom Experiment 1. Hearing adults virtually

Table 4. Hearing adults and deaf and reading-age-matched hearing children’s responses to plural nonwords in Experiment 2

Hearing adult Deaf

Reading-age

matched Deaf vs. reading-age matched χ2

Expected 649/700 (93) 798/1,400 (57) 667/1,400 (47) χ2(1, N= 2,800)= 24.6, p, .001

Omission 1/700 (0.1) 19/1,400 (1) 25/1,400 (2) χ2(1, N= 2,800)= 0.8, p= .4

Unexpected spelling 50/700 (7) 583/1,400 (42) 708/1,400 (51) χ2(1, N= 2,800)= 22.5, p, .001


Note: All hearing adults versus deaf χ2, p, .007; all hearing adults versus reading-age-matched χ2, p, .001.



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always produced plural forms of the nonwords aspredicted by morphological generalization ofregular and semiregular rules. Children alsoshowed evidence of generalized inflections. Themajority of deaf children’s spellings used theregular inflection. This included overgeneralizingthe regular inflection to items where the contextwould favour a different inflection (producingsingular+ plural suffix unexpected spellings), andthey overgeneralized more often than hearing chil-dren did. Both deaf and hearing children rarelyaltered the root in unexpected spellings, showingthat they applied the principle of root consistency.In addition, most of the deaf children’s singular+other grapheme misspellings were from a set ofproductive English suffixes, rather than from gra-phemes that would have been pronounced likethe target or from a set of high-frequency but non-suffix word-final graphemes. Together these resultsdemonstrate morphographic generalization thatwas even stronger than that amongst reading-age-matched hearing children (because hearing childrenare more constrained by pronunciation).

Although nonword plural generation doesensure that word-specific knowledge is notapplied, it is sometimes possible to make analogieswith real words rather than to apply morphographicrules. Coding the nonword stimuli using an ortho-graphic version of Nunes et al.’s (1997a) criterionreveals that analogy could have been an effectivestrategy. The majority of nonwords (all of regularsingular+,s. nonwords) had the same ortho-graphic rime as real words in both singular andplural forms and would, therefore, be consideredanalogous. Analogies were a less plausible expla-nation for the less frequent transformations (e.g.,+,es., final ,y.→,ies.) where there were

either few analogous plurals or the analogouswords were of low frequency. When judging therole of analogy in these results, however, it isimportant to note that ultimately analogy cannotsubstitute for morphological knowledge in thistask. Participants were not provided with thetarget plural in any form. They were only providedthe spelling of the singular and had to generate theplural. Even if participants were making use ofanalogy to complete the task, they would stillhave had to use morphology—that is, they wouldstill need to generate the real-word plural fromthe singular and then analyse and transpose thepart that differed into the nonword.

GENERAL DISCUSSION

We found no evidence that deaf children’s difficultywith literacy could have a basis in the failure of pro-ductive mechanisms that generate and relate wordsby applying the principles of English morphology.Deaf children’s performance on regular and semire-gular plurals was reading-age appropriate. Indeeddeaf children’s performance was, perhaps, strongerthan the simple “reading-age appropriate” labelsuggests, since deaf students are probably acquiringthe morphological system for the first time, whilethe hearing spellers are already familiar with thesealternations in speech. The evidence from ourexperiments shows that morphological generaliz-ation dominates children’s spellings of pluralnouns. Deaf children relied more heavily on mor-phographic rules than did reading-age-matchedhearing children, who also relied on morphologicalgeneralization but in conjunction with phonology.

Table 5. Deaf and reading-age-matched hearing children’s unexpected spellings of plural nonwords in Experiment 2

Deaf Reading-age matched Deaf vs. reading-age matched χ2

Other 48/583 (8) 59/708 (8) χ2(1, N= 1,291)= 0.0, p= .9

Singular+ plural suffix 269/583 (46) 232/708 (33) χ2(1, N= 1,291)= 24.1, p, .001

Singular only 107/583 (18) 177/708 (25) χ2(1, N= 1,291)= 8.2, p= .004

Singular+ other grapheme 159/583 (27) 240/708 (34) χ2(1, N= 1,291)= 6.6, p= .01




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To motivate these conclusions in detail, we brieflyreview evidence for each source of information.

Our study provides abundant evidence that chil-dren applied morphographic generalization. Regularplurals were spelled accurately, and irregularplurals were spelled poorly. Note that for themajority of regular plurals in this study, mor-phology was required to disambiguate betweencompeting phonographic options. Moreover, thevast majority of both deaf and hearing children’serrors retained the singular root, reflecting the prin-ciple of root consistency—that is, more evidence formorphological awareness.

Spellings for known words can reveal generaliz-ation of morphological knowledge but maybe amore controlled test case involves nonwords anderrors (for both existing nouns and nonwords).Children would only reliably produce predictedresponses to nonword plurals if they had general-ized the regular inflection to cases where theycannot rely on word-specific knowledge. Bothdeaf and hearing children did this very successfully.Indeed, deaf children used the expected ending forsignificantly more nonword plurals than hearingchildren, showing that they generalized morewidely.

Errors gave the same picture. Both for wordsand for nonwords, overgeneralization was by farthe most common error type, and deaf childrenmade significantly more of these errors thanhearing children did. Indeed, even a qualitativeanalysis of the idiosyncratic singular+ other gra-pheme misspellings suggested that deaf children’smisspellings were dominated by morphologybecause they virtually always added productivereal English suffixes—for example, *babyer.

Deaf and hearing children were matched on thebasis of reading age, and, being chronologicallyolder and thus having received more years of edu-cation, deaf children had had more experiencewith the written code and therefore more visual–orthographic knowledge. This may explain whytheir spellings could be deemed more orthographi-cally plausible than hearing children’s—that is tosay, deaf children added common grapheme com-binations more often. Nonetheless, the absence ofphonetic spelling (described further below) and

the fact that these additions were real English suf-fixes rather than simply high-frequency word-finalgraphemes suggests that deaf children’s spellingswere based on morphological knowledge ratherthan simply on orthographic relationships.

It could be argued that rather than applyingmorphographic rules to generate novel plurals, chil-dren could make analogies with known words. Weargue that, whilst this is a relevant concern in spel-ling-to-dictation tasks where children are providedwith a phonological representation of the targetplural and, therefore, can use analogy to bypassmorphological processing, in the present taskanalogy would still require morphology. Here,analogy demands generation of the known pluralfrom the analogous singular and then transposingthe plural transformation onto the novel singular.Morphology, whether phonological or ortho-graphic, must have been active in this process.The present findings thus indicate that, whetheror not analogies are active, morphology has a rolein plural spelling.

If children had simply relied on phonographicconversion, performance on irregular pluralsshould not have been dramatically below that ofregular and semiregular plurals. Indeed, perform-ance should have been higher since phoneme–gra-pheme correspondences are typically reliable forirregulars, whereas morphology mediatesphoneme–grapheme relationships for most regularplurals. Instead, irregular plurals were spelledpoorly by all children.

Deaf children’s performance on irregular pluralswas significantly worse than that of hearing chil-dren. Correct spelling of irregulars is dependenton knowing which words are irregular and whatthe irregular spelling is. Models of morphologicalprocessing present a role for phonological andlexical/semantic information for irregular inflection(e.g., Joannise & Seidenberg, 1999; Pinker, 1999).Phonological information is useful to correctly spellirregular inflections because irregular words tend tohave clear phoneme-to-grapheme correspondences.Lexical–semantic information is needed becauseeither irregular forms have to be stored lexically asexceptions to the rule (Pinker, 1999) or, in accountsthat treat regular and irregular inflections as part of



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the same processing system, irregular forms relymore heavily on semantic representations(Joanisse & Seidenberg, 1999). Deaf children notonly have attenuated phonological experience butvocabulary limitations are also common (e.g., Kyle& Harris, 2006). Therefore, hearing childrenmost likely have an advantage over deaf childrenin both domains, resulting in their being morelikely to produce correct or phonologically plausiblespellings of irregulars. Nonetheless, the largenumbers of overgeneralization errors in our datasuggest that deaf children did not merely fail inusing phonographic conversion. It appeared thatthey had not learned, in a word-specific way,which words were irregular in the first place.

Previous research has highlighted the impor-tance of lexical/semantic knowledge in generatingirregular inflections in speech. Adult patients withsemantic deficits (Alzheimer’s disease, semanticdementia, and aphasia) have particularly poor irre-gular verb production compared to regular verbproduction (Marslen-Wilson & Tyler, 1997;Patterson, Lambon Ralph, Hodges, &McClelland, 2001; Ullman et al., 1997), and chil-dren who have specific problems with comprehen-sion are worse than control children at irregularinflection (Nation, Snowling, & Clarke, 2005).The present findings suggest that such knowledgecould also be important in spelling. Deaf childrenmay have specific difficulty with irregular wordsbecause of more general problems with comprehen-sion (like the children studied by Nation et al.,2005).

The comparison with hearing controls, however,is not as direct for the deaf as for poor comprehen-ders. Typically developing hearing children usuallyalready know the phonologically irregular formwhen they embark on learning to spell. They onlyneed to learn the conventional way to spell this.In other words, typically developing hearing chil-dren will have completed the phase of distinguish-ing regular and irregular verbs when they learned tospeak. Poor comprehenders can be directly com-pared to these controls because they have had thesame opportunity to learn from spoken language.The deaf, however, have probably not completedthe task of separating regular from irregular verbs

when they embark on learning to spell. Theyneed to learn this initial distinction in addition toacquiring the proper spellings for irregular items.Although this is a process of lexical/semantic learn-ing, the problems that are apparent in our data mayresult from having poor information about verbforms before they begin the task of learning tospell, rather than from a more general lexical/semantic problem. In order to categorically deter-mine whether deaf children’s difficulty is morestrongly connected to phonological or lexical/semantic factors, exception words that cannot bespelled through regular phoneme–grapheme con-version should be examined, along with compre-hension measures, in order to separate the effectsof phonological and lexical–semantic impairments.

More evidence for the influence of phonology inhearing children’s spellings comes from the differ-ence in performance on semiregular and irregularplurals. Phoneme–grapheme correspondence onsemiregular plurals is often more ambiguous (e.g.,no ,z. in churches), and many plurals that aresemiregular in spelling are completely regular inspeech (e.g., babies). This means that semiregularplurals are affected by a conflict between speechand spelling that does not generally affect irregularspellings. Stronger influence from speech wouldpredict an advantage for hearing children on irregu-lar plurals but a disadvantage on semiregularplurals. Again this is consistent with our results.In contrast, deaf children performed better on semi-regulars (which have a degree of consistency acrossinflections) than on irregulars (which are inflectedin unpredictable ways), suggesting that they reliedmore heavily on morphographic rules, even theless frequent ones.

Finally, error analysis also showed that hearingchildren were less constrained by morpheme con-sistency and more influenced by phonographic cor-respondence. Hearing children produced moreerrors involving a change to the root, and themajority of singular+ other grapheme errors had aphonetic basis. In contrast, deaf children wereheavily constrained by the principle of morphemeconsistency, to the extent that the majority oftheir singular+ other grapheme errors added aninappropriate, real English suffix that was



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phonetically distant from the target. Hearing chil-dren will be less likely to make these errorsbecause they are more aware of the distancebetween the pronunciation of their spelling andthe pronunciation of a plausible target.

Note that this was not a dictation task, thereforethe fact that phonological influences remainedvisible for hearing children highlights the impor-tance of phonology even when not encouraged/necessary in the task. Notably though, althoughphonological recoding had greater impact onhearing than on deaf children’s spellings, even forthem it was not the only, or even the dominant,influence on plural spelling. Most spellings demon-strated use of morphology.

Our results indicate that although deaf childrenwere highly competent in applying morphologicalgeneralization, they had specific difficulty withthe exceptions to the rules, performing below thelevel expected on the basis of their reading age.Irregular plural nouns are very rare in English,accounting for less than 2% of noun types and 3%of noun tokens (Marcus, 1995). This could makethem quite difficult to acquire given the overpower-ing numerical presence of regular items. It may,therefore, be constructive for exception word spel-ling to be given explicit educational attentionalongside instruction in morphographic rules andfor instruction to highlight the contrast betweenregular and exceptional forms.

Since profoundly deaf children’s spellingsshowed clear hallmarks of morphographic general-ization, this means that morphology can be acquiredwith little or no phonological mediation. Moreover,the fact that these deaf children communicated pri-marily using BSL and had limited oral/aural abilitiessuggests that this element of productive literacy doesnot depend on having intact, or possibly having any,substantial representation of speech. In terms of thetheoretical framework outlined in the introduction,this shows that it is possible for development tofollow the course outlined by “early” accounts,where multiple sources of information includingmorphology are used from the beginning (Deaconet al., 2008; Pacton & Deacon, 2008; Treiman &Bourassa, 2000; Treiman & Cassar, 1996) ratherthan this necessarily being preceded by a period of

indiscriminate phonological spelling. However, itis not clear whether the deaf data reveal normaldevelopmental progression under altered conditionsor an altered course of development. What we haveshown is that when phonology is impaired, mor-phology can be a relatively early and systematicinfluence.

Independent of early and late accounts, our resultsshow that morphology could be a potentially impor-tant source of regularity and productivity for otherchildren with language problems (Elbro & Arnbak,1996), such as phonological dyslexics who, like thedeaf, have been argued to have phonological impair-ments resulting in a focus on inefficient visual–orthographic strategies (Brady, 1997; Frith, 1985;Goswami & Bryant, 1990; Stanovich, 1992).

We have argued that our experiments give a clearanswer to the question of whether deaf spellers haveaccess to morphological knowledge. There could besome concern about whether our experiments alsomeasure morphological knowledge as it would beused in other tasks—for example, during uncon-strained prose writing. In particular, one could askwhether participants applied artificial strategiesthat they would not normally use, such as more slav-ishly copying the root morpheme or adding “s” toeverything based on the initial example used to illus-trate the task. Several aspects of the data argueagainst this. We explicitly manipulated theexample that was used at the beginning of the exper-iments, using both a regular and an irregular word(with and without a consistent root). This did notcreate any noticeable difference in results. Inaddition, participants did not simply add “s”. InExperiment 2, where word-specific informationcould not have influenced results, 54% of the unex-pected spellings did not involve the simple additionof “s”. There were a large number of overgeneraliza-tion errors but these by no means accounted for allerrors or even a simple majority. Finally, any biases(e.g., towards overregularization) resulting fromthe nature of the task will have affected both deafand hearing children and cannot explain differencesbetween participant groups.

This is not to say, however, that the results foundfor noun plural here apply to all aspects of morpho-logical knowledge. In particular, more complex



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aspects of morphology such as derivation and com-pounding could show different patterns. Moreresearch is needed to establish whether all aspectsof morphological knowledge will show patternssimilar to those we have reported here and to under-stand whether naturalistic tasks, which do not drawspecific attention tomorphological transformations,will produce substantially different results.

Previous research has shown that context caninfluence how morphology is used. Both adultsand children are more clearly influenced by mor-phology when they are spelling words in a sentencecontext that clearly defines the word class thanwhen they spell isolated pseudowords where noword class is defined (Deacon & Pacton, 2006;Pacton & Fayol, 2003). On the other hand,studies of subject–verb number agreement haveshown that whether morphosyntactic knowledgegets used can be variable and influenced by factorssuch as cognitive load (Fayol, Largy, & Lemaire,1994). In the present study, the singular spellingremained visible while children produced theplural, and children repeatedly produced pluralspellings. The pictures indicating plural formsmade it clear that the words were nouns. In thisway, the cognitive load was low, and morphologywas active. In the worst case, these experimentsmeasure children’s knowledge when their attentionis especially drawn to the plural ending, and, assuch, they measure the upper limit on generaliz-ation. However, having this knowledge availablein the experimental context and completely una-vailable during normal writing involves increasinglycomplex theoretical gyrations. Nonetheless, at thelevel of the sentence, and with a fully functionalmorphological system, writers must integrateknowledge of word-level morphology and morpho-syntax (so that singular and plural nouns agree withtheir verb). Our results do not take us this far.

Knowing how to inflect the noun properly doesnot guarantee that it will function correctly at thesyntactic level where agreement operates. Previousevidence suggests that deaf children have difficultywith complex syntactic structures (Quigley & King,1980) but the specific role ofmorphology in syntacticproduction and comprehension has been given littleattention. Our own results probing sensitivity to

agreement (Breadmore, 2008; Breadmore, Krott,& Olson, 2012) suggest that sentences with agree-ment violations may be registered by deaf readersduring online reading, but they also point to difficul-tieswith explicit awareness of agreement.These earlyresults point to a developing morphological systembut one that may be subject to some processing inef-ficiency.Number inflection is one of the simplest andmost regular inflectional processes.

In conclusion, deaf children’s plural noun andnonword spellings were dominated by morphologi-cal generalization (particularly root and suffix con-sistency and morphographic rules), and these weremore evident than in spellings from reading-age-matched hearing children. For regular plurals andnovel plurals that fit the regular pattern, this washighly advantageous. The regular plural and, byextension, regular inflection does not appear topresent a significant source of impediment to theacquisition of literacy. Words did not appear toremain isolated wholes that would impose a sub-stantial learning and storage cost on the lexicalsystem. Productive morphology was not dependenton detailed phonological representations and wasacquired largely based on evidence from writtenwords. Deaf children did appear to have some dif-ficulty acquiring the exceptions to the regularinflection, and this may be a helpful focus forinstruction. Although the pattern was somewhatdifferent, hearing children’s results confirmed theinfluence of morphological representations.Hearing children were influenced more clearly byconstraints coming from the relationship betweenspelling and speech but they also demonstratedextensive use of morphological strategies specificto the domain of literacy.

Original manuscript received 1 April 2011

Accepted revision received 20 March 2012

First published online 25 May 2012

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APPENDIX A

Features of plural noun stimuli used inExperiment 1

APPENDIX B

Morphological and nonmorphologicalmisspellings from Experiment 1

Deaf children. Morphological misspellings: *babyer,*boxer, *boxing, *bused, *buser, *busers, *busies, *busing,*busrs, *bus’s, *churcher, *dressed, *dresser, *dressies, *dres-sing, *dressings, *dress’s, *fished, *fishers, *fishies, *fishing,*fish’s, *footing, *glassed, *glassers, *glassest, *glassies,*glassing, *glass’s, *gooseing, *knifed, *ladyed, *lady’s,*maned, *man’s, *moused, *mouse’s, *pennyed, *pennyer,*scissorsed, *scissorsers, *scissorsies, *scissorsing, *scissors’s,*sheeped, *sheeping, *shelfers, *shelfing, *toothed, *tooth-ing, *trousersd, *trouserser, *trousersies, *trousersing,*trousers’s

Nonmorphological misspellings: *dresse, *mousese, *toothe,

*trouserse

Hearing children. Morphological misspellings:*baby’s, *boxers, *box’s, *bus’, *bus’s, *churchers, *church-ise, *church’s, *deerers, *deerise, *deer’s, *dress’, *dressers,*dress’s, *fished, *fishers, *fish’s, *glass’s, *goose’s, *knifers,*knife’s, *lady’s, *leaf’s, *leafth, *man’s, *mansise,*pennyers, *penny’s, *scissorsers, *scissors’s, *sheep’s,*shelf’s, *toother, *tooth’s, *trousers’s

Nonmorphological misspellings: *babyis, *babyse, *boxis,

*boxses, *boxsis, *buse, *busis, *busses, *churchis, *deeris, *deerse,

*dressis, *fishis, *fishse, *footet, *footis, *glassis, *gooseis, *knifeiods,

*ladyden, *leafis, *manen, *mouseis, *pennyins, *pennyse, *scissors-

moth, *sheeppise, *shelfe, *shelfie, *shelfse

Word

type Feature

Inflection type

Irregular

M (SD)

Semiregular

M (SD)

Regular

M (SD)

Singular Stimuli Internal change:

foot, goose, man, mouse,

tooth

Root+,es. :

box, bus, church,

dress, glass

Root+,s. :

book, chicken, cloud, door, feather, hand,

horse, plate, skirt, snake, star

Invariant:

deer, fish, scissors, sheep,

trousers

Final ,f� fe. :

knife, leaf, shelf

Unusual suffix:

child

Final ,y. :

baby, lady, penny

CELEX

frequency

2,754 (5,477) 1,295 (1,062) 2,148 (2,748)

CERV frequency 90 (127) 67 (69) 67 (75)

Number of letters 5 (2) 5 (1) 5 (1)

Plural CELEX

frequency

2,890 (4,532) 596 (505) 1,136 (1,537)

CERV frequency 99 (156) 20 (21)a 25 (20)a

Number of letters 5 (2) 6 (1) 6 (1)

Note: CELEX frequency: Based on 17.9 million token text corpus taken from the CELEX database (Baayen et al., 1993). CERV

frequency: Based on 268,028 token children’s text corpus taken from the Children’s Early Reading Vocabulary (CERV)

database (Stuart et al., 2003).aCERV frequency missing for one regular and one semiregular plural.



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APPENDIX C

Experiment 2: Plural nonword stimuli

Root+,s. : chike, chup, clourse, deese, doother, feart, fild, foon, glat, hocken, leate, mour, plar, scik, shend, skith, snase, stad, trour

Root+,es. : barch, booss, chiss, knis, sheex, toosh

Final ,y. : drenny, gooby, pedy

Excluded from analyses:

Final ,f� fe. : bolf, bufe, maf

Unknown: hasers, lassors



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deaf and hearing children's plural noun spelling

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