Beyond Phonology the Role of Morphological and Orthographic Spelling Skills in German

Reinhard Kargl and Karin Landerl

German orthography has highly consistent grapheme–phoneme correspondences, whereas the consistency of phoneme–grapheme correspondences is much lower, but morphological consistency is very high. After giving a short description of German language and orthography, the current article reviews earlier findings on early spelling acquisition, showing that even poor spellers are well able to produce phonologically adequate spellings early on. In contrast, the acquisition of orthographic markers, which are mostly morphology-based, is a long-term enterprise. We present data for the close association of morphological awareness (assessed by a classroom measure requiring students to build new word forms based on presented pseudowords) with orthographic spelling skills. In a large sample (N = 796) of students in Grades 4–7, morphological awareness predicted children’s spelling skills above and beyond fluid intelligence and phonological spelling skills. In the last section of this article, we review findings on the efficiency of morphology-based spelling intervention in German. Key words: morphology, orthography, spelling

GERMAN LANGUAGE AND important features. The inventory of German ORTHOGRAPHY consonant phonemes largely overlaps with English. Standard German has eight vowels Different dialects and vernaculars of Ger- that are expressed in short as well as long man are spoken by an estimated 90 million monophthong pronunciations and three native speakers (Lewis, 2009), which makes diphthongs. Short vowel phonemes are all it one of the major languages of the world. As lax, whereas long vowels (with the exception a West-Germanic language, it is linguistically of /ε:/) are tense. Syllable structure and stress closely related to English as well as Dutch. In patterns are also mostly comparable with the following description of German language English. An important difference is that in and orthography, we will make use of the unstressed syllables, only the /ε/ vowel is high similarity with English and contrast some reduced to schwa, whereas all other vowels are pronounced as their short versions. The phonotactic rules of German are more lenient than in English, so that complex consonant clusters are not simplified but fully Author Affiliations: Institute for Reading and Spelling, Graz, Austria (Mr Kargl); and Institute of pronounced in spoken language (e.g., Knie, Psychology, University of Graz, Graz, Austria Psychologie). (Dr Landerl). An important difference between German R.K. discloses that he is a co-author of the commer- and English (as well as Dutch) is its clearly cial intervention programme MORPHEUS. K.L. indi- richer inflectional morphology. Noun phrases cates that she has no financial and no nonfinancial relationships to disclose. (including articles and adjectives) inflect into four cases, three genders, and two numbers, Corresponding Author: Karin Landerl, PhD, Institute of Psychology, University of Graz, Universitatsplatz¨ 2, which are marked by different suffixes. The 8010 Graz, Austria ([email protected]). verb system is in many ways similar to English, DOI: 10.1097/TLD.0000000000000165 but again, verb forms (including the infinitive) 272

receive different suffixes (e.g., to live—leben: never overrides the phonological principle. ich lebe, du lebst, er lebt, wir leben, ihr lebt, Sometimes the German umlaut graphemes are sie leben) and prefixes (e.g., gelebt [lived], used to retain both morpheme and phonolog- Vorleben [earlier life]). A characteristic fea- ical consistency. For example, plural forma- ture of German is that it allows complex com- tion frequently involves a change of the main pounds that are written as one word (e.g., vowel. Thus, the plural of /bal/ [ball] is /’bεlə/. Geburtstagsfeier [birthday party]; Hausauf- The spellings of the two word forms are Ball gaben [homework]). Morphologically related and Balle¨ . The grapheme a¨ corresponds con- word formation processes frequently induce sistently to the vowel phoneme /ε/ so that the complex consonant sequences, for exam- phonological word form can unambiguously ple, at the end of inflected verbs (e.g., du be derived from the letter sequence. At the schimpfst [you rant]) or in the middle of same time, the singular and plural word forms compound nouns (e.g., Wohnungsschlussel¨ are visually similar, thus retaining consistency [apartment key]). at the morphemic level. German uses an alphabetic orthography The principle of morpheme consistency is written in Latin script (plus the three um- probably the main reason why German is laut letters, A-¨ ä, O-¨ o,¨ and U-¨ u,¨ and the spe- clearly less consistent in the spelling than cial grapheme ß representing /s/ in speci- in the reading direction. Whereas in reading fied contexts). The most important difference there is almost always only one possible trans- from English is that German orthography is lation of a grapheme into a phoneme, the phonologically highly consistent in the read- speller has to choose among various phono- ing direction. This includes vowel quality, logically acceptable translations of a phoneme which (in contrast to English) is unambigu- into a grapheme. This explains why German ously represented in German orthography. (just like English) has a considerable num- Vowel length is coded by a complex set of ber of homophonic spellings, for example, context-sensitive rules (the simplified version mehr—Meer [more—sea], viel—fiel [a lot— is that short vowels are succeeded by two fell], Lied—Lid [song—eyelid], Wal—Wahl consonants, e.g., beten vs. Betten [pray vs. [whale—election]. beds]; but see later). Interestingly, this has lim- Orthographic marking of vowel length is ited implications for word recognition as the particularly inconsistent. Short vowels are typ- number of minimal word pairs that differ only ically marked by two following consonant let- in vowel length is relatively small and their ters; however, there is a set of high-frequency meaning is most often very distinct so that words (mainly function words and preposi- word identification is usually possible even if tions) for which the short vowel is not ortho- vowel length is underspecified or incorrectly graphically marked. For long vowels, there are identified during the decoding process. In- three different kinds of orthographic mark- deed, young learners who predominantly rely ing, doubling of the vowel (Beet, Haar), a on a strategy of systematic left-to-right decod- “silent h” after the vowel (e.g., Zahn, sehr), ing typically produce artificially lengthened or no orthographic marking at all (baden, Re- phonemes (/m:a:n:/), and this artificial pro- gen). There are no clear algorithms for the nunciation is usually sufficient to access the particular orthographic marking (e.g., Tal, correct word in their lexicon (/man/—Mann Zahl, Saal). The long vowel /i:/ is typically [man]). represented by the digraph ie (e.g., Lied), German adheres to the principle of mor- which is taught as “long /i:/.” The vowel pheme consistency, that is, the spelling graphemes u and i never occur as double of morphemes is preserved in different letters. Similarly, doubling of umlaut letters word forms (e.g., fahren, Fahrer, Fahrzeug/ is orthographically illegal; therefore, some [drive], [driver], [vehicle]). However, in con- words that are spelled with a double vowel trast to English, the morphological principle in singular word forms have a simple vowel

spelling in plural form or other word forms 2009; Wimmer, Landerl, Linortner, & Hum- requiring a vowel change (e.g., Saal—Sale¨ ), mer, 1991; Wimmer, Landerl, & Schneider, which violates the principle of morpheme 1994). There is evidence that children who consistency. received phonological awareness training in Inconsistency on the phoneme–grapheme kindergarten show significantly better read- level also is evident for voiced versus un- ing and spelling skills in Grades 1 and 2 but voiced stops. This is mostly due to the fact only when the training involves letters as well that voiced stops are systematically devoiced as sounds (Schneider, Roth, & Ennemoser, in syllable-end position whereas the spelling 2000). Still, the predictive quality of phono- retains the voiced phoneme of the deep struc- logical awareness for reading development ture (e.g., Tag /ta:k/, Tage /ta:gə/ [day–days]) seems to be lower in German than in English and that in certain geographic regions (e.g., in (Landerl et al., 2013; Mann & Wimmer, 2002). Austrian Standard German), the phonemic dis- It should also be noted that the effects of tinction between voiced and unvoiced labio- early phonological awareness training are rel- dental and palatal stops is neutralized in most atively small. This is probably due to the fact phonemic contexts, so that two graphemes that in first grade, children receive systematic correspond to one and the same phoneme. instruction in letter–sound knowledge and To compensate for the high flexibility of phoneme blending and analysis in the context word order in German syntax, nouns are of literacy instruction, which is likely to com- systematically spelled with a capital letter, pensate for any early phonological deficits. As which is meant to allow the reader to iden- a matter of fact, Wimmer, Mayringer, and Lan- tify them easily in any position. Note that in derl (2000) showed that children with poor German, verbs and adjectives can take the phonological awareness at school entry did noun position, which means that words that not develop any reading problems later on. In- are usually spelled with a lower case letter terestingly, however, these children showed (schwimmen [to swim]; rot [red]) need to marked problems with orthographic spelling be capitalized when they are used as nouns in Grades 3 and 4. As explained in detail later, (zum Schwimmen [for swimming]; das Rote at that age even poor spellers are well able to [the red one]). Inflectional and derivational segment spoken words into their constituent morphemes provide information about word sounds and produce phonologically adequate class, for example, words ending in -ung are spellings, but they have very limited knowl- always nouns (buchen [to book]; Buchung edge of word-specific spellings. A plausible [booking]). The morphologically based capi- explanation for the association of phonolog- talization rules pose particular problems for ical awareness with orthographic spelling is spelling acquisition (Menzel, 1985). that the phonological underpinnings (Perfetti, In summary, morphological consistency in- 1992) of orthographic representations might duces a good deal of phonological inconsis- be impaired, which in turn negatively affects tency for spelling. However, phonologically an amalgamation of spoken and written words irregular spellings are exceptional and mostly in the orthographic lexicon (Ehri, 1992). limited to foreign words. Another important predictor across languages and orthographies, which is clearly PREDICTORS OF SPELLING IN GERMAN less well investigated than phonological awareness, is morphological awareness, that In German, as in other languages, phonolog- is, the “conscious awareness of the mor- ical awareness at the syllable and onset/rime phemic structure of words and (the) . . . abil- level develops during the preschool years ity to reflect on and manipulate that structure” whereas awareness of phonemes usually de- (Carlisle, 1995, p. 194). In German, morpho- velops in the context of learning to read (e.g., logical awareness is indispensable in order to Grorecki & Landerl, 2015; Schaefer et al., spell correctly and is explicitly taught, though

to a variable extent. At a minimum, children not show particular problems with cluster receive instruction in distinguishing nouns spellings; phonologically inadequate cluster from other grammatical word categories from spellings were highly exceptional after only Grade 2 on, when they learn which words one school year. The relative ease of con- must be spelled with a capital letter. sonant cluster spelling suggests that early Although an increasing number of stud- segmentation difficulties are easily overcome ies with English-speaking children shows that by the combination of a consistent orthog- morphological awareness explains unique raphy and an instructional regime that in- variance in reading (e.g., Carlisle, 2000; duces children to early word recognition Deacon & Kirby, 2004) and spelling (Deacon in reading by means of grapheme–phoneme & Bryant, 2006a, 2006b; Kemp, 2006), evi- decoding. This procedure provides system- dence is still scarce on the relevance of mor- atic segmentation training, which makes the phology for written language processing in phonemic composition of consonant clusters German. This is surprising, given the morpho- transparent. logical complexities of German language and In line with certain dyslexia theories (e.g., orthography as described previously. Prelim- Tallal, 1984), correct spelling of stop conso- inary evidence shows that performance on nants poses a particular problem in German; a morphosemantic task in kindergarten pre- however, it is mostly voicing (b–p,d– dicts spelling in Grades 1 and 2 (Brunner, t) that is represented incorrectly, but hardly 2007). In this task, three phonologically sim- ever place of articulation (Klicpera, 2000), ilar words are presented orally (e.g., laufen which is not in line with Tallal’s assump- [run]—Laufer¨ [runner]—Leute [people]) and tion that the relevant phoneme categories are children have to identify the two words with not adequately established in individuals with similar meaning (because they are morpho- dyslexia. Indeed, confusion of graphemes rep- logically related). Furthermore, a strong re- resenting voiced versus unvoiced stops is lationship between morphological awareness most often not due to phonological misper- and spelling ability has been demonstrated for ceptions but due to the fact that there is a older children in Grades 5 and 6 (Fink, Pucher, lot of allophonic variation in the voicing of Reicher, Purgstaller, & Kargl, 2012). Before stops inducing inconsistency in the use of the we present more evidence from a large sam- corresponding letters. ple of students in Grades 4–7, we summarize Importantly, even children with dyslexia findings on spelling development in German. develop reasonably adequate phonological spelling skills in German. Their incor- DEVELOPMENT OF PHONOLOGICAL rect spellings typically provide acceptable SPELLING SKILLS transcriptions of the phoneme sequence (sometimes representing colloquial language It has been argued that the spelling of con- or dialect rather than Standard German), but sonant clusters poses a major phonological orthographic markers such as consonant or hurdle to young children as they are par- vowel doublets or the silent letter h that ticularly difficult to segment into separate marks vowel length are omitted or placed phonemes (Treiman, 1993). German provides incorrectly (e.g., Klicpera, 2000; Landerl, an interesting test case for this conclusion 2001; Wimmer & Mayringer, 2002). because just like in English, consonant clusters in syllable onset as well as coda po- DISSOCIATIONS BETWEEN READING sition are frequent (e.g., blau [blue], drei AND SPELLING DURING DEVELOPMENT [three], Hand [hand], Wolf [wolf]). Contrary to predictions, Wimmer and Landerl (1997) Recent evidence indicates that deficits in showed that after only 9 months of formal in- reading versus spelling frequently dissociate struction, German-speaking first graders did in German-speaking children (Moll & Landerl,

2009; Wimmer & Mayringer, 2002). Poor often phonologically nontransparent English- spelling in accordance with adequate reading writing system. skills has been observed and studied in many orthographies including English (e.g., Frith, MORPHOLOGICAL AND 1980; Holmes & Castles, 2001) and is usually ORTHOGRAPHIC SPELLING SKILLS explained by two facts: (1) in most orthographies, phoneme–grapheme correspondences Although some stage models of reading are less consistent than grapheme–phoneme and spelling development assume that in- correspondences, and (2) word spelling tegration of orthographic and morphologi- requires retrieval of fully specified ortho- cal knowledge is a late development (Ehri, graphic representations whereas for word 2005; Frith, 1985), another perspective is that reading, bottom-up processes of word recog- literacy development is an integrated pro- nition can be complemented by top-down cess of various skills, including phonological, lexical processes. There is evidence that orthographic, and morphological processing children with poor spelling but adequate (Berninger, Abbott, Nagy, & Carlisle, 2010; reading skills have phonological awareness Bowers, Kirby, & Deacon, 2010). Thus, the deficits at the onset of reading acquisition assumption is that children draw on differ- (Wimmer & Mayringer, 2002), which they ent types of information throughout develop- seem to be able to overcome later because ment. This is nicely illustrated in the types of heavy practice in phonemic decoding of knowledge children need to have available (Moll & Landerl, 2009). They also manage to in order to spell the highly familiar German acquire highly accurate phonemic analysis word Fahrrad [bicycle] (May, 2012). A young skills allowing them to spell words in a learner might produce the phonologically ac- phonologically acceptable way. However, ceptable spelling farat. However, to pro- their early phonological deficit seems to duce the correct spelling, children must work prevent them from establishing orthographic out that in spoken language, voiced stops word representations that are amalgamated are devoiced in syllable-end position whereas with the phonology of the word (Ehri, 1992). the spelling retains the voiced phoneme of Poor reading in correspondence with age- thebasemorpheme—rad (wheel). They also adequate orthographic spelling has not been need to understand the inconsistent ortho- reported for other orthographies, although graphic marking of vowel length, which in the analysis by Moll and Landerl (2009) in- this case means that a “silent h” is added dicated that 40% of primary school children after the stressed vowel (fahrad). Because with marked problems in reading fluency Fahrrad is a compound that consists of two (below percentile 10) showed spelling skills roots (fahr [drive/ride] and rad [wheel]), within the age norm. A dissociation of deficits it is spelled with two rs in the middle in reading and spelling also was reported by (fahrrad), one from each morpheme. In ad- Wimmer and Mayringer (2002), who demon- dition, all nouns are capitalized; thus, the cor- strated that at school entry, children who later rect spelling is Fahrrad. on showed poor reading in association with This brief example illustrates the high rel- age-adequate spelling skills did not experi- evance of morphological and orthographic ence any deficits in phonological awareness. knowledge in the context of learning to spell Overall, phonological awareness was found in the morphologically complex language of to be a less adequate predictor of reading and German. Empirical evidence for the impor- reading disorders in German than in English tant role that morphological competencies (Landerl et al., 2013; Landerl et al., 2018), play in reading and spelling development indicating that problems in the phonological comes mostly from studies of English (e.g., domain are less detrimental in the consistent Deacon & Bryant, 2006a, 2006b; Kemp, 2006; German orthography than in the complex and Nagy, Berninger, & Abbott, 2006), whereas

evidence for the morphologically more com- (e.g., ver-sprech-en contains the German pre- plex language of German is still surprisingly fix ver). Thus, a morphological spelling strat- scarce. To address this research gap, the egy clearly goes beyond alphabetic spelling, current study investigated the relevance which is based on systematic translation of of morphological skills for orthographic the phoneme sequence into corresponding spelling. A large sample of students in Grades graphemes. As children were already beyond 4–7 was assessed. This age group was partic- the early stages of spelling acquisition, we ularly relevant, as this is when children are expected that errors in alphabetic spelling expected to master the major challenges of would be exceptional and that the majority the German spelling system. of spelling mistakes would reflect negligence Morphological competence is a complex in applying morphological rules. Our central construct that subsumes a variety of differ- hypothesis was that the ability to derive word ent morphological skills and has been as- forms for unknown pseudowords would ac- sessed by a range of different tasks (Deacon, count for unique variance in overall spelling Parrila, & Kirby, 2008; Tibi & Kirby, 2017). skills, above and beyond fluid intelligence and In our research, we focused on two central phonological/alphabetic spelling skills. aspects within the broad range of morphological competencies: morphological aware- STUDY ness and morphological spelling skills. To investigate the relation between morphological Participants awareness, learning to use morphologically A large convenience sample of children correct spellings, and general spelling abili- aged between 9 and 13 years, attending ties, we developed a set of classroom tasks Grades 4–7 in Austria and Germany partici- to assess each of these components. Mor- pated. Only students who were reported to phological awareness was assessed in terms speak predominantly German at home were of a written paradigm, which required stu- admitted to the study. Assessments took place dents to complete sentences by deriving at children’s schools and lasted for a maxi- new word forms from a presented pseu- mum of two school lessons (approximately 90 doword (e.g., Peter kann gut bruben. Er min). Complete data from all tasks were avail- hat gut ______. (gebrubt)[Petercan able from 796 children (402 girls, 394 boys; brub well. He has ______well]). In this n = 188 for Grade 4; n = 419 for Grade 5; task format, the students need to apply their n = 125 for Grade 6; and n = 64 for Grade 7). morphological knowledge, whereas it was not necessary to spell the pseudoword Tasks “stem” correctly. In a preliminary study (Fink et al., 2012) with children in Grades 5 and Spelling 6, this task correlated significantly (r = .59) This task was developed in our labora- with performance on a standardized spelling tory. Students were asked to write 64 words test. In the current study, spelling was as- to complete dictated sentence frames (e.g., sessed with a task that allowed a more Wir treffen uns am ______. fine-grained assessment of student’s spelling (Fußballplatz) [We meet on the ______. strategies. A morphological spelling strategy (soccer field)]). The words were selected relates to the application of morphological to contain the most relevant and typical knowledge in word spelling: To spell mor- orthographic markers and the stems were phologically complex words correctly, the taken from a German basic vocabulary for students need to correctly identify and spell fourth graders (Augst, 1989). In addition to the word stem, add the correct grammati- the score for number of correctly spelled cal morphemes (e.g., fahren–fahrt¨ ), and seg- graphemes, which provides a general mea- ment them into their morphemic constituents sure of spelling ability, we applied a more

differentiated scoring scheme that is informa- basis of a standardized spelling test (Ham- tive with respect to the strategies applied to burger Schreibprobe; May, Vieluf, & Malitzky, spell a certain word: Alphabetic spelling accu- 2000). This instrument provides a reliable racy (the number of words that were spelled (internal consistencies for Grades 4–7 are in a phonologically adequate way), morpho- between 0.75 and 0.84) measure of phonological spelling accuracy (number of correctly logical spelling competence. Words and sen- spelled prefixes, suffixes, and stems), and or- tences were dictated by the experimenter and thographic spelling accuracy (number of cor- hadtobewrittennexttoacorresponding rectly spelled orthographic markers, e.g., dou- picture illustration. The phonological spelling bling of consonants after short vowels, “silent score is based on a set of words that include h” after long vowels, the digraph ie,and 30 phonologically complex letters clusters (a the special grapheme ß). The scoring pro- point is given for each correctly spelled letter cedure was highly standardized and partly cluster). computer-aided. Specifically, every word was divided into graphemes, all relevant ortho- Nonverbal IQ graphic markers and morphological spellings Students were given subtest 3 of the were predetermined, and analysis was aided Culture-Fair Test (CFT-20-R, Weiß & Weiß, with a computerized scoring procedure. 2006), a commonly used test to measure fluid intelligence with high psychometric quality. Morphological awareness Three-month test–retest reliability is reported To assess morphological awareness in our as 0.80–0.82 in the test manual. large sample, a written task format was developed that could be presented as a class- Results room test. We used pseudowords to assess Table 1 shows the descriptive statistics for an important facet of a child’s morphologi- morphological awareness (cloze test pseu- cal awareness, namely, the understanding of dowords), spelling ability (correctly spelled morphological principles and rules. A given graphemes), alphabetic spelling accuracy, or- pseudoword had to be adequately inflected thographic spelling accuracy, morphological or derived to complete written sentences. spelling accuracy, phonologically adequate The task consisted of 35 pseudowords that spellings, and fluid intelligence. All variables had to be filled into corresponding gaps with- were negatively skewed, suggesting that stu- out time limitation (generally, students took dents were at the upper end of the abil- about 20 min). Children had to use inflec- ity spectrum. In particular, the scores for al- tional suffixes (e.g., Das ist ein Nerb. Das sind phabetic spellings and phonological spellings, mehrere ______. (Nerbs) [This is a which both assessed children’s ability to trans- nerb. These are several ______.]) as well late the phoneme sequence adequately into as derivational suffixes (e.g., Georg kann gut graphemes, were high, confirming once again bruben. Er ist ein guter ______. that translating the sounds of words into ade- (Bruber) [Georg can brub well. He is a good quately representative graphemes is not a par- ______.]). The number of correct mor- ticular challenge in the phonologically trans- phemes produced was scored, whereas in- parent German orthography. correct spellings of the pseudoword stem it- To get a first impression of the associ- self were not considered. Cronbach’s α for ation of our morphological awareness task this task was 0.81 (based on item-based scor- with spelling, we analyzed partial corre- ing of a subsample of 376 students from lations (controlling for grade level) with 18 classrooms). the alphabetic, morphological, and orthographic spelling accuracy measures and over- Phonological spelling all spelling ability as well as with fluid Children’s ability to spell words phono- intelligence and the phonological spelling logically correctly also was assessed on the score. Because of the large sample size,

all correlations were highly signiﬁcant (all ps < .001). The correlation between

) morphological awareness and overall spelling

SE ability was r = .59. As expected, correlations (

Kurtosis with morphological awareness were higher for morphological spelling skills (r = .53) and orthographic spelling skills (r = .50), but somewhat lower for alphabetic spelling skills ) (r = .44) and the phonological spelling score SE ( (r = .42), and notably lower for ﬂuid intelli- 2.50 (0.09) 11.07 (0.17) 0.07 (0.09) 2.05 (0.17) 1.85 (0.09) 4.21 (0.17) 0.76 (0.09) 0.55 (0.17) 5.02 (0.09)1.99 (0.09) 36.47 (0.17) 5.33 (0.17) 1.00 (0.09) 0.65 (0.17)

Skewness = − − − − − − − gence (r .24). To test whether morphological awareness explains variance in children’s spelling skills over and above ﬂuid intelligence and phonological skills, general linear univariate modeling was used to evaluate the contribu- tions to overall spelling ability (number of MSD correctly spelled graphemes) by ﬂuid intelligence, phonologically adequate spellings, and morphological awareness (cloze test pseudowords). Grade was also entered as an in-

Total dependent variable in the modeling. Results Possible revealed a small but significant effect of fluid intelligence (F(1, 791) = 10.92, p = .001, 2 η p = .01), significant effects of phonologically adequate spelling (F(1, 791) = 101.50, 2 p < .001, η p = .11), and morphological awareness (F(1, 791) = 210.49, p < .001, 2 η p = .21). There was no significant effect of grade (F(1, 791) = 0.08, p = .77, 1 352 35 24.08 6.64 η p < .001). Minimum Maximum DISCUSSION

The results of our analysis indicate a strong and speciﬁc association of the understanding of morphological principles and rules with spelling skills in Grades 4–7. Note that the relationship between constructs might actually be somewhat attenuated due to skewness among some of our variables. Thus, the assertion that morphological processing is relevant for written language processing, which is mostly based on data in English (e.g., Deacon & Bryant, 2006a, 2006b; Kemp, Descriptive statistics for study variables 2006) and French (Casalis, Deacon, & Pacton, 2011; Casalis & Louis-Alexandre, 2000) was pseudowords) conﬁrmed for learning to spell in German: Fluid intelligence 0 15 15 10.22 2.89 Morphological awareness (cloze test Phonologically adequate spellings 12 30 30 24.25 2.56 Spelling (correctly spelled graphemes) 292 544 544 512.97 28.93 Alphabetic spelling skills 32 64 64 62.51 2.87 Orthographic spelling skillsMorphological spelling skills 1 14 43 85 43 85 34.11 73.86 11.17 5.65

Table 1. The ability to understand the morphological

structure of spoken language and to produc- work than any problems in reading fluency. tively apply its morphological rules is strongly Furthermore, a considerable number of chil- associated with children’s ability to spell dren experience serious deficits in spelling in words orthographically correctly. This is not spite of intact reading skills (e.g., Moll & Lan- surprising because, as explained previously, derl, 2009). Only in the very early stages of the complexities of the German spelling learning or in very serious delays do spelling system are mostly morphology based. problems in German concern the ability to ad- For English, it was important to demon- equately segment sound sequences into their strate that morphological awareness explains constituent phonemes and translate those variance in written language skills above and into corresponding graphemes. The domi- beyond phonological awareness (e.g., Nagy nant types of spelling errors in German are et al., 2006). The very same issue—whether phonologically adequate spellings that do not or not morphological awareness accounts contain the mostly morphology-based ortho- for variance over and above phonological graphic markers like double vowels or double awareness—is less critical in the consistent consonants. Thus, we are faced with the prob- orthography of German, where variance in lem that phonology-based training programs phonological awareness is generally low due as they have been devised for English are not to ceiling effects. In the current study, even sufficient for German-speaking children. the poorest spellers were able to segment spo- An economical approach toward spelling ken words into their constituent phonemes, intervention is programs that exploit the prin- as demonstrated by the high number of alpha- ciple of morpheme constancy, that is, that betically correct spellings. For the age group morphemes are spelled consistently in dif- investigated in our study, we would thus ferent word forms (Arnbak & Elbro, 2000; expect ceiling effects for standard measures Bowers & Bowers, 2017; Kirby & Bowers, of phonological awareness like phoneme 2017). For instance, knowing how to spell segmentation or deletion. It will be important the stem “friend” helps spell morphologically to implement longitudinal designs that assess related words by adding prefixes and/or suf- phonological and morphological awareness fixes (e.g., un-friend-ly). Inflectional as well in younger age groups and test for the amount as derivational morphemes also provide infor- of variance in later orthographic spelling skills mation about word class (e.g., words ending that is accounted for by each of these compo- in –ness are nouns and words ending in –ed nents. Obviously, such designs also would be are verbs), which is particularly important in more informative with respect to causality. German as all nouns are spelled with a capital In the current study, it is unclear whether initial letter (essen [to eat] vs. das Essen [the morphological awareness is the foundation eating]). of morphological and orthographic spelling The morphological structure of German skills or whether learning about spelling makes it possible to derive a large number patterns drives the development of mor- of words from one particular stem. Because phological awareness. If it is the case that of the principle of morpheme constancy, morphological awareness causally predicts the spelling of the stem is the same across spelling skills, interventions that focus on word forms. Thus, practicing the spellings of morphology should have positive effects. high-frequency morphemes may yield com- Indeed, such effects have been demonstrated paratively good intervention success with rel- and will be summarized in the next section. atively little effort. Morpheme-based intervention programs thus focus on children’s Morphological spelling intervention morphological awareness and morphological In the German language, deficits in spelling spelling strategies. skills often are more obvious and therefore Based on these principles, Kargl and more prominent in children’s written school Purgstaller (2010) developed MORPHEUS,

a computer-aided, morpheme-based spelling mentation, simplicity, consolidation by prac- treatment program, which has a number tice, playfulness, avoiding mistakes, adapta- of similarities with the Structured Word In- tion to the level of the individual learner, and quiry program that was developed for En- practice through handwriting. glish by Bowers and Kirby (2010) at the same Meanwhile, the efficacy of the MOR- time. The MORPHEUS program includes a PHEUS spelling intervention has been in- book of exercises, computerized tutorials (see vestigated in our laboratory in a series Figure 1 for an example), and morpheme- of small-scale pre-/posttest studies compris- based games to facilitate consolidation. The ing students from late elementary and sec- intervention consists of five instructor-guided ondary school (Gebauer, Fink, Filippini, et al., courses (lasting approximately 2 hr, delivered 2012; Gebauer, Fink, Kargl, et al., 2012; once per week) and daily handwritten and Kargl, Purgstaller, Mrazek, Ertl, & Fink, 2011; computer homework and lasts 5–6 weeks. Kargl, Purgstaller, Weiss, & Fink, 2008; The tutorials on the computer include 12 dif- Schneeberger et al., 2011; Weiss, Grabner, ferent game-like exercises dealing with mor- Kargl, Purgstaller, & Fink, 2010). All stud- phemes (e.g., recognizing and matching word ies focused on improvements in spelling families, morphological cloze tasks, finding ability, which were determined using the suffixes and prefixes). During the tutorials, same standardized test that was used in the scores are tabulated and displayed on the com- current study (May et al., 2000) and al- puter screen. Participants can reach the next lows a more fine-grained evaluation of chil- difficulty level of the same exercise only when dren’s spelling strategies. Some of these they have solved at least 75% of the given studies also analyzed improvements in mor- problems correctly. The automatically saved phological awareness, whereas others in- score of each tutorial serves as the basis for as- cluded additional assessment of reading sessing treatment progress. The intervention skills. materials of the MORPHEUS program consist The first study (Kargl et al., 2008) had four of the most frequent morphemes of the Ger- groups of on average 12-year-old participants man language and contain different levels of (13 in each group, age range: 10–15 years): difficulty. The words used for the intervention Two treatment groups (poor spelling below were taken from an empirically based collec- percentile 25 vs. average spelling above per- tion of words (German basic vocabulary for centile 25) and two control groups that were fourth graders; Augst, 1989). The MORPHEUS matched with the training groups on age and program was constructed using the following pretest spelling level (poor vs. average). Al- 1 principles and/or constructs: morpheme seg- though the instruction lasted only 2 /2 weeks

Figure 1. Example from computer-aided, morpheme-based spelling training program (Kargl & Purgstaller, 2010; reprinted with permission); children have to decide whether or not a word contains a particular stem.

(including homework and five instructor- and 15) in the same age range. Again, both guided lessons), both training groups showed treatment groups (spelling as well as read- significant and comparable improvements ing) showed improvements in reading com- 2 in general spelling ability (η p = .18) and prehension, whereas this time the untreated 2 morphological spelling skills (η p = .10). control groups did not improve at all. In sum- Based on the morphological cloze test used mary, several studies have demonstrated that in the study reported here, which was given a morphologically structured treatment pro- to an additional group of 33 average spellers gram has the potential to improve not only (age range: 8–17 years) receiving the same spelling and morphological awareness but short-term intervention, it could be demon- also reading skills. strated that the program had a significant ef- Quite strikingly, we could demonstrate di- 2 fect on morphological awareness (η p = .37) rect effects of the MORPHEUS intervention on 2 as well as morphological spelling skills (η p = brain function using repeated (f)MRI param- .27), whereas the number of correctly spelled eters (Gebauer, Fink, Filippini, et al., 2012; words did not improve during the short treat- Gebauer, Fink, Kargl, et al., 2012). Prior ment period. Weiss et al. (2010) used a simi- to intervention, children with poor spelling lar intervention to train 34 students in Grades and reading abilities (N = 10) showed in- 3–8 with low-average spelling performance. creased activation in frontal medial and right Again, treated children improved their mor- hemispheric regions and decreased activa- 2 phological spelling skills (η p = .15), whereas tion in left occipitotemporal regions com- an untreated group (constituted using pair- pared with a control group during a lexi- wise matching on age, spelling ability, non- cal decision task. After 5 weeks of interven- verbal intelligence, and gender) showed no tion, spelling and reading comprehension sig- change. However, on standardized tests of nificantly improved in the treatment group spelling and word reading fluency, only older (but not in matched untreated groups of poor children at secondarygrade levels showed sig- as well as average spellers), along with in- nificant improvements, whereas elementary creased activation in left temporal, parahip- school children showed no improvements in pocampal, and hippocampal regions. These their standardized test scores. findings seem to indicate a normalization of Whereas the studies reported so far as- brain functions in terms of an increased left sessed the effects of the MORPHEUS inter- temporal activation associated with the rec- vention compared with an untreated control ollection of the newly acquired morpheme- group, Schneeberger et al. (2011) also in- based spelling skills (Gebauer, Fink, Kargl, cluded a trained control group (N = 21) re- et al., 2012). Based on the same sample, ceiving an nonspecific reading intervention. Gebauer, Fink, Filippini, et al. (2012) even The MORPHEUS treatment group (N = 25) found some indication of changes in white- and an untrained control group (N = 19) matter integrity in the right hemisphere were matched for age (range: 8–16 years) using pre-/postintervention diffusion tensor and spelling level (low-average). Although imaging. all three groups showed improvements in Thus, the reported results are promising as reading comprehension, only the MORPHEUS they suggest that morphological instruction treatment group improved significantly in can effectively improve spelling in poor as 2 morphological spelling skills (η p = .09) as well as average spellers. In particular, treated 2 well as general spelling ability (η p = .13). students showed evidence of improved Specific improvement in spelling after MOR- morphological spelling skills: They provided 2 PHEUS training was replicated (η p = .28 for more correct spellings of stem, derivational, morphological and .21 for general spelling and inflectional morphemes than before in- skills) in a later study (Kargl et al., 2011), tervention. However, a more comprehensive with slightly smaller groups (Ns between 11 evaluation of the MORPHEUS program in

terms of a large-scale randomized controlled much mastered the hurdles of phonological trial is needed. It will also be important to spelling, which, as illustrated earlier on, are further investigate the exact mechanisms not particularly high in the phonologically underlying the observed improvements. In transparent German orthography. Thus, find- particular, is an intervention that focuses ings are not informative with respect to the on morphemes more efficient than one that ongoing discussion regarding whether or not practices whole-word spellings? In morpho- instruction based on morphology can be used logically rich languages such as German, mere right from the start or only later on (Bowers & exposure to the very same material without Bowers, 2017; Kirby & Bowers, 2017). The ev- explicit reference to morphological structure idence reported in this article, however, con- might potentially be sufficient to induce vincingly shows that morphological aware- similar improvements. Note that the fact ness is relevant to represent the complexities that the MORPHEUS intervention improves of German orthography. Furthermore, find- children’s morphological awareness suggests ings in German confirm evidence (Goodwin that the treatment does help them better un- & Ahn, 2010, 2013) that morphologically derstand the morphological basis of German structured intervention is an efficient means orthography. to improve spelling beyond a phonology- The MORPHEUS intervention is usually based strategy of simple phoneme–grapheme provided only once children have pretty translation.

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