Korochkina Maria, Rastle Kathleen
Department of Psychology, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey, UK.
NPJ Sci Learn. 2025 May 5;10(1):22. doi: 10.1038/s41539-025-00313-6.
Breaking down complex words into smaller meaningful units (e.g., unhappy = un- + happy), known as morphemes, is vital for skilled reading as it allows readers to rapidly compute word meanings. There is agreement that children rely on reading experience to acquire morphological knowledge in English; however, the nature of this experience has remained unclear. We quantify the morphological information in 1200 popular children's books and offer the first concrete description of how readers may learn affix morphemes through real-life text input. Our account considers the realities of morpheme presentation in natural language, such as the low number of distinct words in which affixes appear and the fact that their identification often requires specialised linguistic knowledge. This theory further accounts for the challenge posed by spelling patterns that may lead to incorrect morphological parsing. We conclude by exploring the implications of our findings for instructional programmes in morphology.
将复杂单词分解为更小的有意义单元（例如，unhappy = un- + happy），即所谓的语素，对于熟练阅读至关重要，因为它能让读者快速理解单词含义。人们一致认为，儿童依靠阅读经验来获取英语中的形态学知识；然而，这种经验的本质仍不明确。我们对1200本流行儿童书籍中的形态学信息进行了量化，并首次具体描述了读者如何通过现实生活中的文本输入来学习词缀语素。我们的描述考虑了自然语言中语素呈现的实际情况，比如包含词缀的不同单词数量较少，以及识别词缀往往需要专业语言知识这一事实。该理论还进一步解释了可能导致形态学解析错误的拼写模式所带来的挑战。我们通过探讨研究结果对形态学教学计划的影响来结束本文。
