Morphological processing in reading acquisition: A cross-linguistic perspective

Word identification, which is the retrieval of the linguistic constituents (phonological, semantic) of a word, plays a central role in children’s reading development. This development includes the automatization of word decoding and the attainment of fluent reading levels, both essential for skilled reading with comprehension (Perfetti, 1992; Stanovich, 2000; Verhoeven & van Leeuwe, 2009). In learning to read, children first acquire elementary decoding skills, and then gradually apply these skills with greater accuracy and speed, leading to an increasingly automated process of that recognizes multiletter units (consonant clusters, syllables, and morphemes) and whole words (Ehri, 2005). Automatic word recognition enables the devotion of mental resources to the meaning of a text and thus allows readers to use reading as a tool for the acquisition of new information and knowledge (Perfetti, 1998; Stanovich, 2000). Different architectures have been proposed to account for the processing of visual word forms. The central assumption underlying the so-called dual-route theories of reading is that two independent processes or routes can be followed to generate the pronunciation of a word: the lexical route or the nonlexical route. The lexical processing of a word involves access of the word’s representation in the orthographic input lexicon followed by retrieval of the word’s spoken form from the phonological output lexicon. The nonlexical processing of a word involves the application of a set of grapheme–phoneme correspondence (GPC) rules to the relevant string of letters and subsequent assembly of the word’s phonology (e.g., Coltheart, Rastle, Perry, Langdon, & Ziegler, 2001). An alternative architecture comes from parallel distributed processing (PDP) models. Central to a PDP