Abstract

MOTA, Márcia Maria Peruzzi Elia da et al. Morphological Awareness Development in the First Years of Primary Education. Psicol. pesq. [online]. 2012, vol.6, n.1, pp. 13-18. ISSN 1982-1247.

Morphological awareness is the ability to reflect upon a word´s morphemes. This ability is related to reading and spelling acquisition. Most studies carried out in the Portuguese language have focused on the development of flexional morphology. Less is known about derivational morphology. This study looked at the development of derivational morphology. Thirty-seven children from grades one and three were given a lexical decision task that required judging a pair of words on the basis of Portuguese language morphology. The results showed that first grade children made the judgments at random levels. Third grade children had above random performance. However, no grade effects were found for comparisons between grades. These results are different from the ones usually found in the literature. The type of task used and the nature of the school system are possible explanation for differences in performance.

Keywords : Derivational morphology; morphological awareness; metalinguistic awareness; metalinguistic abilities.

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