Third graders' metalinguistic skills, reading skills, and stress production in derived English words.

PURPOSE: This study examined relationships between 3rd graders' metalinguistic skills (phonological and morphological awareness), reading skills (decoding and word identification), and accurate stress production in derived words with stress-changing suffixes. METHOD: Seventy-six typically developing 3rd-grade children (M=8;8[years;months]) participated in a battery of tests measuring general oral language ability, phonological and morphological awareness skills, reading skills, and derived word production. RESULTS: Significant positive correlations between stress accuracy in derived words and all other measures were found. Two multiple regressions were run, one with stress accuracy as the outcome variable and the other with decoding as the outcome variable. Metalinguistic and decoding skills independently accounted for a significant proportion of the variance in derived word stress production beyond that accounted for by age and general oral language ability. When decoding was the outcome variable, accurate stress production explained a significant amount of variance (11%) after phonological and morphological awareness were controlled. CONCLUSION: The relationship between accurate stress production and decoding appears to be strong and bidirectional. Possibly, the stress accuracy measure taps into another level of phonological awareness (i.e., morphophonological awareness), which develops later than typical segmental measures of phonological awareness.

Exploration of lexical-semantic factors affecting stress production in derived words.

PURPOSE: This study examined whether lexical frequency, semantic knowledge, or sentence context affect children's production of primary stress in derived words with stress-changing suffixes (e.g., -ity). METHOD: Thirty children (M(age) = 9;1 [years;months]) produced a limited set of high-frequency (HF) and low-frequency (LF) derived words formed with stress-changing suffixes (e.g., -ity). Half of the children produced the derived words in a sentence context. The other half produced words in isolation. Semantic knowledge of the derived words was also assessed. RESULTS: Primary stress was produced more accurately in HF words than in LF words. HF words produced in a sentence context were more accurate than all LF words and HF words produced in isolation. Both knowing a word's meaning and accurately producing stress was more likely for HF words than for LF words. A substantial minority of derived words (36%) was either known semantically or produced correctly, but not both. CONCLUSION: Accurate morphophonological production may involve semantic and frequency factors, but those factors alone do not explain all of the results. This study isolates several important factors that may be useful when choosing derived word stimuli.

How African American English-Speaking First Graders Segment and Rhyme Words and Nonwords With Final Consonant Clusters.

Purpose: This study explored how typically developing 1st grade African American English (AAE) speakers differ from mainstream American English (MAE) speakers in the completion of 2 common phonological awareness tasks (rhyming and phoneme segmentation) when the stimulus items were consonant-vowel-consonant-consonant (CVCC) words and nonwords. Method: Forty-nine 1st graders met criteria for 2 dialect groups: AAE and MAE. Three conditions were tested in each rhyme and segmentation task: Real Words No Model, Real Words With a Model, and Nonwords With a Model. Results: The AAE group had significantly more responses that rhymed CVCC words with consonant-vowel-consonant words and segmented CVCC words as consonant-vowel-consonant than the MAE group across all experimental conditions. In the rhyming task, the presence of a model in the real word condition elicited more reduced final cluster responses for both groups. In the segmentation task, the MAE group was at ceiling, so only the AAE group changed across the different stimulus presentations and reduced the final cluster less often when given a model. Conclusion: Rhyming and phoneme segmentation performance can be influenced by a child's dialect when CVCC words are used.

Metalinguistics, stress accuracy, and word reading: does dialect matter?

PURPOSE: The authors examined the influence of demographic variables on nonmainstream American English (NMAE) use; the differences between NMAE speakers and mainstream American English (MAE) speakers on measures of metalinguistics, single-word reading, and a new measure of morphophonology; and the differences between the 2 groups in the relationships among the measures. METHOD: Participants were typically developing 3rd graders from Memphis, TN, including 21 MAE and 21 NMAE speakers. Children received a battery of tests measuring phonological and morphological awareness (PA and MA), morphophonology (i.e., accurately produced lexical stress in derived words), decoding, and word identification (WID). RESULTS: Controlling for socioeconomic status, measures of PA, decoding, and WID were higher for MAE than for NMAE speakers. There was no difference in stress accuracy between the dialect groups. Only for the NMAE group were PA and MA significantly related to decoding and WID. Stress accuracy was correlated with word reading for the NMAE speakers and with all measures for the MAE speakers. CONCLUSION: Stress accuracy was consistently related to reading measures, even when PA and MA were not. Morphophonology involving suprasegmental factors may be an area of convergence between language varieties because of its consistent relationship to word reading.