Top Lang Disorders Vol. 38, No. 4, pp. 272–285 Copyright c 2018 Wolters Kluwer Health, Inc. All rights reserved. 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 consis- tency 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 re- quiring 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 Copyright © 2018 Wolters Kluwer Health, Inc. Unauthorized reproduction of this article is prohibited. Spelling in German 273 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-¨ ¨a, 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 Copyright © 2018 Wolters Kluwer Health, Inc. Unauthorized reproduction of this article is prohibited. 274 TOPICS IN LANGUAGE DISORDERS/OCTOBER–DECEMBER 2018 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.