The effects of phonological skills and vocabulary on morphophonological processing

What is it about?

The acquisition of allomorphs, phonological variant forms of morphemes, has been found to be affected by the phonological characteristics of the stems the allomorphs attach too. This article expands on these finding by assessing whether children's phonological processing skills influence their awareness of what the correct allomorph should be. In addition, children's vocabulary size is assessed as it is expected that the larger a child's lexicon, the more instances of stem+allomorph combinations the child has in his/her lexicon, and the better he/she will be at knowing what the correct allomorph should be. The results show that, although children's vocabulary size is indeed important, their phonological skill seem more strongly associated with allomorphic production and judgement accuracies.

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