The developmental pattern of spelling in Catalan from first to fifth school grade

Abstract

Orthographies not only represent the phonology of a language but also aspects of morphology, syntax and the lexicon. Learning to spell in a particular language involves understanding the relation between the graphic elements of an orthographic system and the levels of language it represents. The goal of this study was to track the developmental path to orthographic spelling in native speakers of Catalan. Typologically, Catalan is a synthetic inflectional language with a rich inflectional and derivational morphology that has a moderately transparent orthography. In most cases, straight phonetic to written mapping renders incorrect spelling and spellers have to resort to morphology, word-contextual rules or to lexical knowledge to spell accurately. We analyse a corpus of written vocabularies from different semantic fields, that prime different syntactic categories and a variety of word features relevant for spelling, produced by 225 native speakers of Catalan from 1st–5th school grade. The productions were characterised in terms of spelling (in)accuracy on the basis of whether phonographic, morphologic, word-contextual or lexical knowledge was required to render the orthographically correct form. Results show that phonographically- and morphologically-based spellings are mastered earlier than orthographic and lexical errors. More errors occurred at the word stem than at the word affix level, suggesting a role of morphological awareness in spelling. Children misspelt words for Natural phenomena less than words in the other semantic fields, suggesting that primary via of exposure to words has an impact on learning to spell. Some linguistic and educational implications of these findings are discussed.