The relations between children's linguistic awareness and spelling: The case of the apostrophe

Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal12: 253–276, 2000.© 2000Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

253

The relations between children’s linguistic awareness andspelling: The case of the apostrophe

PETER BRYANT1, TEREZINHA NUNES2 & MIRIAM BINDMAN 2

1Department of Experimental Psychology, Univerity of Oxford;2Department of ChildDevelopment and Learning, Institute of Education, University of London, UK

Abstract. In a longitudinal study, we looked at the link between children’s understandingof a morphemically-based orthographic rule and their awareness of morphemic distinctions.The orthographic rule in question was the use of the apostrophe to denote possession inEnglish. Early on in the study, we gave the children phonological, semantic/syntactic andmorpho-syntactic awareness tasks, and later we gave them a spelling task in which theyhad to write words which were either genitives (e.g., ‘boy’s’) or nominative or accusativeplurals (e.g., ‘boys’). Eight- to 10-year-old children found this task difficult, but their per-formance improved to some extent with age. The morpho-syntactic, but not the phonologicalor semantic/syntactic, awareness tasks predicted how well the children placed apostrophesin genitive words and omitted them from plural words. We conclude that different forms oflinguistic awareness affect different aspects of reading and spelling. Learning about spellingpatterns based on morphemes is heavily influenced by children’s morpho-syntactic awarenessbut not, apparently, by other forms of linguistic awareness.

Keywords: Spelling, Morphemes, Apostrophes, Possessives, Metalinguistic awareness

Introduction

Children’s awareness of linguistic distinctions plays an important role in theprogress that they make when they learn to read and to spell. This has beendemonstrated in three ways. The first concerns phonology: children’s scoresin various tasks which test their awareness of phonological distinctions, suchas rhyme or phoneme detection tasks, are strongly related to this successin reading and spelling (Adams 1990; Goswami & Bryant 1990; Lundberg1994; Rego & Bryant 1993; Stanovich, Cunningham & Cramer 1984; Wag-ner & Torgeson 1987). These scores predict their reading levels over severalyears after stringent controls for differences in extraneous variables such asIQ and SES (Bradley & Bryant 1983; Bryant, MacLean, Bradley & Crossland1990).

It is usually assumed that the reason for this strong connection is thatchildren have to learn about the basic correspondences between alphabetic

254 P. BRYANT, T. NUNES & M. BINDMAN

letters and sounds, and that their ability to analyse the sounds in words helpsthem to do so. This assumption is a specific one: it is of a specific link betweenanalysing sounds and learning about letter-sound correspondences.

A second link that has been found between children’s linguistic know-ledge and their reading and spelling involves tests of children’s sensitivityto semantic and syntactic constraints in the construction of sentences (Tun-mer, Herriman & Nesdale 1988; Tunmer, Nesdale & Wright 1987). In oneof the tests (sentence anagrams) devised by Tunmer et al., children areasked to put scrambled sentences (‘John the bike rides’) in order, and inanother (incomplete sentences) they have to supply a plausible missing wordin an incomplete sentence (‘Jack his sister ran up the hill’).It has been known for some time that these tasks are strongly related tochildren’s general progress in reading (Tunmer, Herriman & Nesdale 1988;Tunmer, Nesdale & Wright 1987). The tasks were originally called ‘syntacticawareness’ tests, but, as Gombert (1992) has pointed out, they plainly makedemands on the children’s semantic knowledge as well since the child must,for example, take into account the meaning as well as the syntactic statusof the words to give a correct response in the incomplete sentences task.For this reason, we will refer to them as tests of syntactic/semantic aware-ness.

Recent work has shown that the link between syntactic/semantic aware-ness and children’s reading may be confined to a particular aspect of reading.In a longitudinal study Rego & Bryant (1993) found that such tasks predictedchildren’s success in using context, when reading. It predicted their ability towork out the meaning of a difficult word. But these tasks were not related tothe children’s ability to use grapheme-phoneme correspondences in an inven-ted spelling task devised by Mann, Tobin & Wilson (1987), nor to their scoresin a pseudo-word reading task which also made demands on their knowledgeof grapheme-phoneme relations. On the other hand, in these same studies thechildren’s performance in a phonological task (phoneme oddity) predictedtheir success in these two grapheme-phoneme tasks but was not related totheir ability to take advantage of context when reading. Thus the connectionsbetween these two forms of linguistic awareness and children’s reading seemto be quite different in each case, and both are highly specific.

A third, and also quite different link, between children’s linguistic aware-ness and their reading concerns morphemes. There are several tasks whichtest children’s ability to manipulate derivational and inflectional morphemes.In one task (Carlisle 1995; Fowler & Liberman 1995) children have to pro-duce words with added morphemes from stem words (four: the racehorsecame in ) or vice versa (fourth: when he counted the puppiesthere were ). In another task (Carlisle 1995) children have

LEARNING TO READ AND LINGUISTIC AWARENESS 255

to make judgements about morphemically related and unrelated pairs ofwords (Do you think that fabulous comes from fable? corner from corn?).In a third (Nunes, Bryant & Bindman 1997a) children have to make ana-logies, either with words (teacher: taught :: writer : ?) or with sentences(Tom helps Mary: Tom helped Mary :: Tom sees Mary :: ?). All thesetasks were quite strongly related to children’s subsequent success in read-ing and spelling, and the Nunes, Bryant & Bindman study, which was alongitudinal one, also showed that children’s scores in the analogy taskswere an excellent predictor of how children learn about the conventionalspelling for inflectional morphemes, such as the ‘-ed’ ending on regular pastverbs.

This result suggests that the child’s morphological knowledge will helphim or her to learn that there are certain conventional spellings for morphemeswhich do not fit well with the basic letter-sound rules. For example, ‘-ed’is the written ending for regular verbs, despite the fact that it represents thesound /d/ or /t/ or /id/, and the beginnings of most interrogatives are spelled as‘wh’ despite the fact that the spoken beginning is /w/ (‘when’) or /h/ (‘who’).Once again this claim is a specific one: it is of a specific link between chil-dren’s morphological knowledge and their learning about the conventionalspellings for morphemes.

However, the idea of specific and separate connections between particu-lar forms of metalinguistic knowledge and particular aspects of reading andspelling has not been adequately tested yet. There is an obvious alternativehypothesis which was put forward some time ago by Bowey & Patel (1988).It is that children’s linguistic knowledge in general is related to their progressin reading in general. This entirely non-specific hypothesis has not beeneliminated. The trouble is that most of the claims for specific connectionshave been based on studies which dealt with only one kind of metalinguistictask. Simply to show that phonological tasks predict children’s learning ofletter-sound relationships or that morphological tasks predict their learningof the conventional spelling of morphemes is not enough. One also needsto test negative predictions, as Rego & Bryant (1993) did in their study ofthe relative contributions of phonological and syntactic/semantic knowledge.As well as showing that morphological tasks do predict the learning for theconventional spellings for morphemes, one needs also to show that otherlinguistic awareness tasks do not.

In this paper, we investigate the assumption of a specific connectionbetween children’s morpho-syntactic awareness and how well they learn tospell certain morphemes. We do this by testing the prediction that children’smorpho-syntactic awareness will predict their subsequent learning of the con-


ventional spelling for these morphemes and that their syntactic/semantic andtheir phonological awareness will not.

The knowledge of conventional spelling for morphemes that we meas-ure is the children’s use of the apostrophe to denote possession in English.This aspect of English spelling has the additional advantage that it is apure example of children’s use of morphological knowledge in spelling.The examples that we gave earlier of conventional spellings were all ofmorphophonemic segments, which means that the morphemes in question arerepresented by a distinctive speech sound and that this sound has a conven-tional spelling. The apostrophe is not like this: this spelling device representsno sound: the syntactic distinction between the plural ‘girls’ and the genitive‘girl’s’ is represented in writing but not in speech. (The same is true whenapostrophes represent contractions, e.g., ‘The girl’s at home now’.) Thus,because the apostrophe does not represent an actual sound, it gives us aparticularly direct and pure way of studying children’s understanding of therelation between morphemes and spelling.

Apart from a short term intervention study (Bryant, Devine, Ledward& Nunes 1997), there is no research about how children learn to put theapostrophe in English genitive words (‘the boy’s sail’) or contracted words(‘the boy’s sailing’). We do not know how long it takes English-speakingchildren to learn about the apostrophe, and we have no information on theprocesses underlying this learning. This is a surprising gap, especially whenone considers that the correct use of the apostrophe is a modern shibbolethof literacy. It is widely taken as a sensitive sign of person’s ability to spell.Someone who omits apostrophes where they are needed and inserts them inplaces where they should not be is immediately classified as a poorly educatedperson.

We looked at the ability of children of 8–10 years to use apostrophes ingenitive words and not to use them in (nominative and accusative) plurals.One of our aims was to find out how well children in this age range havemastered the genitive apostrophe, but our main purpose was to look at thelink between children’s explicit linguistic awareness and their success withthe genitive apostrophe.

If the specific hypothesis is right, the progress that children make withlearning about the apostrophe should depend on the extent of their morpho-syntactic awareness and should not be affected by their phonological aware-ness. Tests of phonological awareness which have proved such powerfulpredictors of children’s early progress in reading and spelling should not berelated to the use of the apostrophe at all. On the other hand, there should bea strong connection between the children’s scores in tests of morphologicalawareness and this aspect of reading and spelling.


Our study was a longitudinal one: various aspects of this study (none ofthem to do with apostrophes) have already been reported in other publica-tions (Bryant, Nunes & Bindman 1997; Bryant, Nunes & Bindman 1999;Nunes, Bryant & Bindman 1997a, b). Here we shall report data which covera period of 28 months. We took measures of children’s morpho-syntactic,syntactic/semantic and phonological awareness several sessions before welooked at their understanding of the apostrophe, and we looked at the rela-tionship between the children’s linguistic scores and their success later on inlearning about the apostrophe.

Method

Participants.This was a longitudinal study of 152 children. When it started,the children were at three different grade levels – (Years 2, 3 and 4) andwhen it finished, over two years later they were in Year 4, 5 and 6. Weshall report data from four sessions, A, B, C and D: the gap between Aand B was 11 months, between B and C 8 months and between C and D8 months. The three sessions covered a period of 28 months in all. The datathat we shall present will be about the children whom we tested in all foursessions. The children’s ages in the four sessions and their IQs are presentedin Table 1. The children were drawn from four different schools in a medium-sized city: the intake to these schools varied considerably in socio-economicterms and as a result our sample covered a wide range of socio-economicbackgrounds. All the children in our sample had learned English as their firstlanguage.

Design. As tests of different forms of linguistic awareness, we gave thechildren: (1) the same morpho-syntactic awareness task (word analogy) insessions A and B, (2) two syntactic/semantic awareness tasks (scrambledsentences and incomplete sentences) in session A, and (3) a phonologicalawareness task (phoneme oddity) in session B. We gave our main out-come measure, which was a test of the children’s ability to use apostrophescorrectly, in session D.

We gave children an IQ test (WISC-III) shortly after session A and wegave them a standardised single word reading test (Schonell and Goodacre,1971), which is a measure of decoding, in Sessions A and C. The scores forthese standardised tests are also presented in Table 1.

In all the schools which took part in the study, the children begin tobe taught formally about the apostrophe in Years 5 and 6. Our test of thechildren’s use of the apostrophe in session D took place in the middle ofthe school year. Since at the time the children were in Years 4, 5 and 6,


Table 1. The children’s mean ages in the four sessions, their mean reading ages in sessionsA and C, and their mean IQs

Sessions

A B C D

N Age RA IQ Age Age RA Age

Young group 42

mean 6y3m 6y10m 106.8 7y2m 8y0m 8y5m 8y7m

SD 3.4 11.1 15.3 3.3 3.4 15.7 3.5

Middle group 62


SD 3.5 13.7 16.8 3.5 3.5 16.2 3.3

Old group 48


SD 2.3 17.6 16.0 3.5 2.3 18.0 2.4

y = years : m = monthsAge and Reading Age SDs are given in months.

the youngest children had not been taught about the apostrophe when theywere given the apostrophe task. The year 5 children had been taught aboutapostrophes over a period of roughly 4 months and the year 6 children forabout 16 months.

The aim of this design was to see how well the linguistic tasks given insessions A and b predicted the children’s understanding of the use of theapostrophe to denote possession in session D. Our testing time in each sessionwas limited. Although we were able to give the children the Word Analogytask in both the first two sessions, we only had time to give the two sentencetasks in the first session and the phoneme oddity tasks in the second.

Procedure

The morpho-syntactic awareness (word analogy) task – sessions A and B

This was a purely oral task. The children had to identify a morphologicaltransformation that had been made to one word and then they had to carryout a parallel transformation on another word. Thus the task demanded expli-cit morphemic judgements. The child heard the same word in two syntacticforms, e.g., a noun and then its adjective, and then was given a second word


Table 2. The eight trials in the word analogy task

Verb tense transformations

1. walk walked 2. cried cry 3. see saw

shake drew dance

Noun/verb transformations

1. teacher taught 2. work worker 3. sing song

writer write live

Noun/adjective transformations

1. anger anger 2. happy happiness

strength high

in one form and had to put that word into the other syntactic form, e.g., againto derive an adjective from the noun.

There were eight trials which are presented in Table 2: in each trial theexperimenter said a word and then a puppet said another word which was atransformation of the first. Then the experimenter said a different word andasked the child to make the same transformation (‘the same change’) withthis word as the puppet had with the previous word.

As Table 2 shows, three of the transformations were from past verbs topresent verbs or vice versa (e.g., ‘walk’ – ‘walked’) and some of these pastverbs were regular and others irregular in form: three of the transformationswere from noun to verb or vice versa (e.g. ‘teacher’ – ‘taught’) and two werefrom noun to adjective or vice versa (e.g., ‘anger’ – ‘angry’). The first group,therefore, involved transformations from one tense to another, while the trans-formations in the second and third groups were from one part of speech toanother and therefore involved derived forms. The reason for including thesedifferent kinds of transformation and for using irregular as well as regular pastverbs was to sample children’s understanding of morpho-syntactic relationsquite widely in this task. The order of the different trials was systematicallyvaried between children.

The task did not include transformations either of nominative to genitiveor of singular to plural (or vice versa). Our hypothesis is that children’s aware-ness of morphemes in general will affect their learning of every conventionalspelling for morphemes.


The syntactic/semantic tasks (sentence anagrams and incomplete sentences)– session A

There were 15 trials in the incomplete sentence task. In each trial, the exper-imenter pronounced a sentence with a word missing. When s/he came to themissing word, the experimenter tapped once on the table and at the end ofthe sentence the child was asked to supply the missing word. The missingword was sometimes a function word (‘Jack his sister ran upthe hill’) and sometimes a content word (‘She baked chocolate ’).Any appropriate response was scored as correct.

There were 12 trials in the sentence anagram task, in each of which thechild heard the words of a sentence presented in the wrong order and wasasked to put them in the right order. The material used in both tasks, presentedin Table 3, is an adapted form of the material devised by Tunmer, Herriman& Nesdale (1988).

The phoneme oddity (phonological awarenes) task – session B

To measure phonological awareness we used a phoneme oddity task, sincethis has been shown to be an excellent predictor of children’s reading in thepast. This was also an entirely oral task, in which children heard three wordsin each trail, two of which either started or ended with the same phonemewhile the other word (the odd one out) did not: the child’s task was to detectthe odd word.

There were 20 trials in two blocks of 10. In one block, the common phon-eme was to the beginning and in the other, at the end of the words. The orderto the blocks was counterbalanced between children. The words that we usedin the different trials are presented in Table 4.

Each block began with two practice trials. If the child was given the Begin-ning Sounds block first, s/he was told at the start, ‘We are going to play a gamewhere you have to listen carefully to the sounds in some words. Two of thesewords sound the same at the beginning, but the other one sounds different.The different one might be the first one that I say, it might be the middle oneor it might be the last one. Can you tell me which one it is?’ Then we gavethe two practice trials in which we explained why the correct choice was theright one, whether or not the child got it right. The remaining trials were givenwithout feedback. The same form of instruction was given at the start of thenext block.

LEA

RN

ING

TO

RE

AD

AN

DLIN

GU

IST

ICA

WA

RE

NE

SS

261

Table 3. The Syntactic/Semantic tasks

Sentence anagrams

1. Patted Bill the dog. 7. Teacher the a read story.

2. Wrote Peter his name. 8. Cat the chased bird the.

3. Susan the bike rode. 9. Blue his dad a has car.

4. Time the juice drank. 10. Lady a pretty next lives door.

5. Kicked his ball Stephen 11. Cakes baking is some Susan.

6. Chased cat the Jim. 12. Dad driving is the car.

Incomplete sentences

1. The pretty little put on their dresses. 9. Jack his sister ran up the hill.

2. The little pigs ate corn. 10. Three the boys were eating their lunch.

3. ‘ is at the door?’ he asked. 11. “ is wrong with you?” the doctor asked.

4. John buys candy at the . 12. It very cold yesterday.

5. They raking leaves when it got dark. 13. Because of the rain, the children inside the house.

6. She baked chocolate . 14. The puppy jumped his basket.

7. The boy down and hurt his knees. 15. It was a sunny day with a pretty sky.

8. The mean scared little Red Riding Hood.


Table 4. The words used in the phoneme oddity tasks

Beginning sound task End sound task

Practical trials Practice trials

1. dot lamb den 1. pin gun hat

2. same sight cop 2. doll mug peg

Experimental trials Experimental trials

1. cap come fit 1. nut pot fig

2. log pet lid 2. wake knife beak

3. met mop sign 3. tile bowl rake

4. fill bet bus 4. wept pink honk

5. brain climb cloak 5. built pans felt

6. frog fret snack 6. band paint mount

7. spike flute spade 7. hiss back toss

8. creep slime stain 8. field jived paint

9. flood steam spade 9. lift pond wept

10. spit creep stain 10. film keeps box

Note: the odd words out are underlined.

The apostrophe spelling task: genitives and plurals – session C

The experimenter gave the children two sheets of paper which containedincomplete written sentences arranged in a randomised order. One word wasmissing in each sentence and this was signified by an underlined space. Inseven sentences the missing word was genitive and in seven it was a nom-inative or accusative plural word. Before the task began, the children weretold that we wanted to see whether they knew when to use an apostrophe andwhen not to do so. The experimenter then dictated each sentence one by one.When s/he did so s/he included the missing word and, having completed thesentence, she repeated that word. The child’s task was to write in the missingword in the space provided.

To make the two sets of words comparable, we used the same seven wordsin both syntactic categories. Table 5 shows the seven genitive words whichrequired apostrophes and the seven plurals which did not. In some of thesentences with a missing genitive word, this was clearly a singular word(‘The dog’s tail is wagging’), while in others it could be either singular orplural (‘Is this the bird’s/birds’ nest’). In our scoring of these sentences wecounted the word as correct when the apostrophe was placed just before orjust after the “s”, whether or not the word in question was definitely a singularone.


Table 5. The seven sentences in which the missing word was genitive and the seven inwhich it was a nominative or accusative plural

Genitive sentences Plural sentences

1. Is this thebird’s nest? 1. Somebirds fly away to a warmer place.

2. Thedog’s tail is wagging. 2. Thedogsare barking.

3. Look at thetree’sbranches. 3. Oaktreesgrow very tall.

4. Thetoy’s paint is peeling. 4. David is playing with histoys.

5. Is this theboy’s football? 5. Look at theboysplaying football.

6. Thecup’shandle is wet. 6. Thecupsare empty.

7. Did you eat thegirl’s cake? 7. Thegirls are late.

Note: The underlined words were missing in the written sentences given to each child.The missing word was signified by an underlined space, and the child’s task was to writein the word after hearing the whole sentence dictated.

Standardised tests.Three months after session A we gave all the children ashortened version of the WISC-III, which contained three verbal (vocabulary,similarities, digit span) and three performance sub-tests (object assembly,block design, coding). We also gave the children the Schonell standardisedsingle word Reading Test (Schonell & Goodacre, 1971) in sessions A and C.

Results

The first question that we asked was how good children are at placingapostrophes in genitive words and at omitting them from nominative oraccusative plural words. We looked at this question in three ways.

The first was to count the number of correct spellings in genitive and pluralwords. In the genitive trials, we counted as correct those words which thechildren completed with an ‘s or an s’. In the plural trials, we scored as correctall the words written with an “s” ending and with no apostrophe in any partof the word.

Our second measure, which we called ‘the discrimination of genitive andplural scores’, was a combined score of success with each word in its genitiveand its plural form. Since the same words appeared in the genitive and theplural list in the spelling task, we could measure the number of times that thechild was correct with the same word in its genitive and its plural form. Witheach of the seven words, we gave the child a score of 1 if s/he correctly putan apostrophe with each word in its genitive form (e.g., ‘girl’s’) and omittedit in its plural form (e.g., ‘girls’). Thus the maximum score for this combineddiscrimination of genitive and plural was 7.


Table 6. The mean correct scores in the genitive and plural spelling tasks

Correct scores (out of 7)

Genitive score Plural score Discrimination of

genitive and plural score

Young group

mean 4.17 3.00 1.07

SD 2.60 2.45 1.57

Middle group

mean 4.08 3.69 1.68

SD 2.39 2.23 1.70

Old group

mean 4.29 3.93 2.15

SD 2.01 2.22 2.11

With our third measure, we looked at the kind of errors that the childrenmade. With genitives, the children’s errors took three forms:

(1) omissions– writing the word with an ‘s’ ending but omitting theapostrophe entirely,

(2) misplaced apostrophe– writing the word with an ‘s’ ending but placingthe apostrophe in the wrong position. A correct placement of the apo-strophe in our scoring was just before or just after the “s”, which meant adegree of leniency on our part in the two sentences (sentences 2 and 6 inTable 5) in which the word in question was obviously singular. Thus wescored “dogs” as well as “dog’s” as correct in the sentence “The dog’stail is wagging”, but we counted ‘d’ogs”, for example, as a misplacedapostrophe. In fact, nearly all the apostrophes placed next to the “s” wereplaced just before it. Apostrophes after the “s” were extremely infre-quent and there were no instances of a double “s” (e.g. dogs’s). This wastrue also of the apostrophes which children placed incorrectly in pluralwords.

(3) no response– either not attempting to write the word or not completingit: we scored any word without an “s” ending in this category.

With plural words, we found two types of error:

(1) inappropriate apostrophe– placing an apostrophe in the word, and(2) no response– either not attempting to write the word or not completing

it: again we scored any word without an “s” ending in this category.


Table 7. The types of error in genitive and plural spelling tasks

Error scores

Types of error in Types of error

the genitive task in the plural task

Omission of Misplaced No Inappropriate No

apostrophe apostrophe response apostrophe response

Young group

mean 2.41 0.05 0.38 3.62 0.38

SD 2.38 0.22 1.23 2.58 1.30

Middle group

mean 2.69 0.03 0.19 3.15 0.16

SD 2.38 0.26 0.72 2.22 0.61

Old group

mean 2.58 0.04 0.08 2.94 0.13

SD 2.07 0.20 0.58 2.20 0.49

Age comparisons.Table 6 gives the results for the first two measures. Itshows that all three age groups encountered considerable difficulty in thespelling task. The number of correctly placed apostrophes in genitive wordswas barely above 50% and showed no improvement with age. The number oftimes that the children correctly omitted apostrophes in the plural words wasactually below 50%. There was some improvement with age but the oldestgroup’s mean score was still very low indeed. In a two-way repeated meas-ures analysis of variance of correct endings in which the main terms wereAge Group and Word-Type (genitives vs. plurals), there were no significantdifferences. Thus this analysis showed no developmental change.

Table 7, which gives the kinds of error that the children made, shows thatthe vast majority of their mistakes took the form of incorrectly leaving outthe apostrophe in the genitive condition and of inappropriately putting it inthe plural condition. The number of other errors (misplacing the apostropheor not completing the word) was negligible. Thus these error scores, andparticularly the high score for apostrophes inappropriately placed in pluralwords, shows that the children’s main problem was not in learning to use theapostrophe but in knowing when to leave it out.

The table shows that the number of times that the children incorrectlyplaced apostrophes in plural words declined to some extent with age. Thenumber of times that they incorrectly omitted them in genitive words stayed


roughly constant with age. Two separate one-way analyses of variance inwhich the main term was Age Groups and the outcome measures were thenumber of incorrectly placed apostrophes in plural words in one analysis andthe number of omissions of apostrophes from genitive words in the otheranalysis produced no significant differences. Thus these analyses too showedno developmental differences. The other types of errors, as Table 7 shows,were so infrequent that they were not amedable to statistical analysis.

Table 6 shows that the discrimination of genitive and plural measure (thenumber of times that that the child gave each of the seven words an apo-strophe in its genitive form and not in its plural form) also produced lowscores, but there was a definite improvement in this score with age. Sincethere are four possibilities with each word (correct response in both forms,correct in genitive but not in plural form, correct in plural but not in genitiveform, incorrect in both) chance level stands at 0.25. With seven words a childacting randomly would be expected to produce a score of 1.75. Table 6 showsthat the scores of the two younger groups were no higher than this, but that theoldest group’s mean score was appreciably higher. We carried out a one-wayanalysis of variance of this score in which the independent variable was AgeGroups. Here the term was significant [F(2,149) = 3.97;p = 0.02] and TukeyHSD post-tests showed that this was due to a significant difference betweenthe 8 and the 10 year olds [p < 0.05]. Thus when we analysed the scores interms of the children’s success with both forms of the same words we did findsigns of a developmental improvement.

Correlations between response patterns.Since the error scores suggest thatunderstanding the apostrophe depends on learning when not to use it, as wellas when to use it, the possibility arises that some children use the apostropheprofusely both with genitives and plurals while others do not use it much witheither category of words. Both patterns of responding would indicate that thechildren who produced them did not understand the morphemic basis for theapostrophe. If a group consists mainly of children producing one of these twopatterns, there should be: (1) a negative correlation between success with thegenitive words and success with the plurals, (2) a positive correlation betweenthe number of times that children are correct with the genitive words and thenumber of times that they incorrectly place apostrophes in plural words, and(3) a positive correlation between the number of times that they correctlyomit the apostrophe in plural words and incorrectly omit it in genitive words.These negative and positive correlations, therefore, would signify difficultiesin understanding the morphemic basis of the apostrophe.

Table 8 shows that, as we had predicted, the correlation between correctscores in the two conditions was negative with all three age groups, and there


Table 8. Correlations with correct scores and with error scores in the three age groups

Age groups

Correlations between: 8 years 9 years 10 years

1. Correct genitives and −0.57∗∗∗ −0.54∗∗∗ −0.25

correct plurals

2. Correct genitives and 0.77∗∗∗ 0.58∗∗∗ 0.29∗inappropriate apostrophes

in the plural condition

3. Correct plurals and 0.67∗∗∗ 0.59∗∗∗ 0.27

omission of apostrophes

in the genitive condition

∗∗∗p< 0.001;∗p< 0.05.

were positive correlations between placing the apostrophe appropriately inthe genitive and inappropriately in the plural condition, and between omittingthe apostrophe incorrectly in the genitive condition and correctly in the pluralcondition.

However, these three correlations were much stronger in the two youngergroups than in the oldest group. In the oldest group only one of the correl-ations was significant and only just so, while in the two younger groups allthree correlations were highly significant.

This means that several children in years 4 and 5 either used the apo-strophe altogether too little or altogether too much, while the Year 6 childrenwere beginning to be more discriminating. The difference between thestrength of these correlations in the different age groups in evidence that theyounger children, for the most part, have very little idea of the morphemicbasis for the apostrophe, but that this understanding grows as children growolder and become more experienced.

The relation between the metalinguistic tasks and the use of the apostrophe.So far, the results demonstrate that children between 8 and 10 years of agefind it hard to understand how to use apostrophes appropriately, and that theirdifficulty may be due to their failure to grasp the morphemic distinctionsinvolved. If that is the case, their explicit awareness of the morphemic statusof different words should play a role in determining how well they learnabout apostrophes. There should, therefore, be a relationship between chil-dren’s scores in the morpho-syntactic awareness task and their performancein the apostrophe task later on. However, there should be no such connection


Table 9. The scores in the linguistic awareness tasks

Correct scores

Word analogy tasks Syntactic/semantic tasks Phoneme oddity tasks

Sentence Incomplete (out of 10)

Session A Session B anagrams sentences Beginning End

(out of 8) (out of 8) (out of 12) (out of 15) sound sound

Young group

mean 1.22 3.02 7.67 8.33 8.12 6.48

SD 1.61 1.54 4.66 4.66 2.11 2.43

Middle group

mean 2.15 3.40 10.15 10.32 9.10 6.90

SD 1.53 1.61 2.59 2.56 1.43 2.24

Old group

mean 2.73 3.58 11.10 11.35 9.40 7.21

SD 1.59 1.57 2.17 1.95 1.41 2.18

between their ability to make phonological or syntactic/semantic judgementsand their success with apostrophes.

To look at this prediction, we turned to the scores in the word analogyand the phoneme oddity tasks. Table 9 gives the mean scores in these tasks.It shows that word analogy tasks were quite hard and that the older childrenmanaged them better than the younger children. We also looked at the differ-ent types of transformations (see Table 2) and compared the transformationsinvolving verb tenses (Group 1) to those involving transformations from onepart of speech to another (Groups 2 and 3). The tense transformations wereslightly easier than the parts of speech transformation (35.09% and 29.64%correct respectively in the first session, and 41.05% and 43.66% correctrespectively in the second session).

The table also shows that there was a marked difference between thetwo phoneme oddity tasks: the end sound task was harder than the begin-ning sound task, a result which replicates a previous report (Kirtley, Bry-ant, MacLean & Bradley 1989). The scores for the beginning sound taskapproached ceiling levels and for this reason we decided to use only the endsound scores in further analyses.

Our purpose was to see whether these linguistic awareness measures,taken in sessions A and B, predicted children’s use of the apostrophe insession D. We ran three 4-step fixed order multiple regressions. In each of


these, the outcome measure (the dependent variable) was the combined scorefor the discrimination of genitive and plural score in session D. The aim ofthese analyses was to test our prediction that the children’s morpho-syntacticawareness (word analogy) scores, but not their phonological awareness(phoneme oddity) scores should be related to this outcome measure.

We used multiple regressions because we wanted to rule out the effectsof differences in extraneous variables, and so we entered three such variablesas the first three steps. The first variable that we entered was the children’sages at the time of the spelling test, the second was their IQ and the third wastheir standardised reading score in session C. The fourth and final step in eachanalysis was one of the linguistic awareness scores (word analogy in sessionsA and B: sentence anagrams and incomplete sentence scores in session A,and phoneme oddity in session B). Thus we could be sure that any significantrelationship that we found between any of these linguistic awareness scoresand the correct use of the apostrophe was not due to age differences or todifferences in IQ or to differences in the general progress that the childrenhad made in reading.

We carried out five multiple regressions in which the joint discriminationof genitive and plural score was always the outcome measure and the firstthree steps were always Age, IQ and Reading Age. In the first regression,the fourth step was the word analogy scores from session A and in thesecond, it was the word analogy scores from session B. In the third and fourthregressions, the final step was the session A sentence anagram scores and thesession A incomplete sentence scores respectively. In the fifth regression, thefourth step was the end-sound phoneme oddity score from session B. We didnot include the beginning sound oddity scores because of the ceiling effectsin these scores.

Table 10 shows that both the session A and the session B word analogyscores were significant predictors of the children’s subsequent success inlearning about apostrophes. Despite stringent controls for differences in age,IQ and general reading level, the children’s performance in this morpho-syntactic task was significantly related to their success in this aspect ofspelling over two years later on. This significant connection is impressivegiven that the word analogy task did not include morphological transforma-tions involving either genitive or plural words.

In contrast, neither the sentence anagram nor the incomplete sentencescores predicted how well the children used the apostrophe. The phonemeoddity scores in session B also failed to predict the children’s performancein the apostrophe task. These negative outcomes were predicted and arestrong support for the idea of a specific connection between morpho-syntacticawareness and children’s learning about the conventional spelling for morph-


Table 10.Multiple regressions in which the outcome measure was the discriminationof genitive and plural scores in Sessions D, and the first three steps were Age, IQ andthe child’s reading level in Session C: the fourth step was one of the five linguisticawareness scores

Regression measures

r2 change B SE B beta

Steps common to all

three regressions

1. Age 0.055∗∗ 0.047 0.015 0.242

2. IQ 0.038∗ 0.022 0.009 0.194

3. Reading age 0.064∗∗ 0.033 0.010 0.327

in Session C

The final step in each

of the five regressions

4. Word analogy

in Session A 0.024∗ 0.221 0.217 0.193

4. Word analogy 0.037∗ 0.260 0.100 0.224

in Session B

4. Sentence anagrams 0.016 −0.086 0.052 −0.158

in Session A

4. Incomplete sentences 0.001 0.031 0.066 0.049

in Session A

4. Phoneme oddity 0.004 0.068 0.077 0.085

(end sounds) in Session B

∗∗p< 0.01;∗p< 0.05.

emes. The morpho-syntactic awareness scores predict this spelling, and otherlinguistic awareness scores (normally highly successful predictors of readingand spelling) do not.

The relative success of the word analogy scores as a predictor is extremelyimpressive in that these scores actually predicted the children’s spelling per-formance over a period of 28 months (session A to D) as well as over 17months (session B to D), while the phoneme oddity task failed to predicttheir spelling over the shorter period of 17 months.

Even though the phoneme oddity scores were not significantly relatedto the use of apostrophes, we wanted to make sure that the link betweenperformance in the word analogy task was entirely independent of anydifferences in phonological skill. So we carried out two further multiple


regressions, each with five steps. The first four steps were Age, IQ, Readingage, and performance in the end sound phoneme oddity task: the final stepin one multiple regression was the word analogy task in Session A and inthe other the word analogy task in Session B. In both regressions the wordanalogy score still accounted for a significant amount of variance. With theword analogy scores in Session A the figures were r2 change = 0.022 (p <0.05):β = 0.214, and with the word analogy scores in Session A the figureswere r2 change = 0.040 (p < 0.01): β = 0.281. There is therefore a directconnection, independent of phonological ability, between word analogy andthe correct use of apostrophes.

Finally when we broke the word analogy scores into the two categoriesmentioned before (transformations involving verb tenses and transformationsacross different parts of speech), we found that children’s success with trans-formations across parts of speech in the first session predicted the use ofapostrophes, and so did their success with transformations across verb tensesin Session B. In four-step multiple regressions in which the first three stepscontrolled for differences in Age, I.Q. and reading age, performance with theverb tense transformations did not predict the appropriate use of apostrophes(r2 change = 0.009:β = 0.113) but performance in the transformations acrossdifferent parts of speech did make a significant prediction (r2 change = 0.023:β = 0.177;p< 0.05). With the Session B scores performance, it was the otherway round: performance with the verb tense transformations did predict theappropriate use of apostrophes (r2 change = 0.027:β = 0.193; p < 0.05)but performance in the transformations across different parts of speech justfailed to make a significant prediction (r2 change = 0.018:β = 0.146;p <0.07). We have no explanation for the changing pattern of predictions with thescores in the two sessions, but note that both categories of scores do producea significant prediction in one of the sessions.

Although both the positive and negative outcomes that we have just repor-ted support the hypothesis that there are specific links between differentaspects of linguistic awareness and different aspects of reading and spelling,there is another possible explanation for the negative outcome with the syn-tactic/semantic and the phoneme oddity scores. It could be the case that theunsuccessful syntactic/semantic and phonological tasks happen not to be con-nected to children’s reading in any way at all. This would mean that each ofthese tasks failed to predict apostrophes because they would fail to predictany other aspect of reading or spelling.

This alternative is unlikely to be correct, given the consistent success thatsyntactic/semantic and phonological tasks have had in predicting children’sreading and spelling in previous research. In fact, our own data demonstratethat it is wrong: in subsequent three-step multiple regressions we showed that


Table 11. Multiple regressions in which the outcome measure was the children’sreading ages in Session C, and the first two steps were Age and IQ

Regression measures

r2 change B SE B beta

Step in the regressions

1. Age 0.202∗∗∗ 0.888 0.145 0.450

2. IQ 0.228∗∗∗ 0.570 0.074 0.478

3. Word analogy

in Session A 0.088∗∗∗ 4.035 0.773 0.335

3. Word analogy

in Session B 0.037∗∗ 2.605 0.810 0.216

3. Sentence anagrams

in Session A 0.028∗∗ 1.099 0.410 0.208

3. Incomplete sentences

in Session A 0.077∗∗∗ 2.301 0.475 0.345

3. Phoneme oddity

(end sounds) in Session B 0.089∗∗∗ 2.722 0.539 0.343

∗∗∗p< 0.001;∗∗p< 0.01;∗p< 0.05.

the session A and the session C word analogy scores, the syntactic/semanticand the phonological scores were all significantly related to the children’sreading scores in session C. Table 11 gives the details of five multipleregressions which show this. In each of these, the outcome measure was thechildren’s reading ages in session C. The first two steps in these analyseswere age and IQ and the third step was the word analogy scores (session A& B), the sentence anagram and incomplete sentence anagrams (session A)and the end sound phoneme oddity scores (session B). All five scores weresignificantly related to the children’s reading levels in session C.

This leaves us with the explanation offered by our hypothesis about spe-cific connections between children’s linguistic awareness and their readingand spelling. It is that morpho-syntactic awareness and not phonologicalawareness is related to children’s learning about apostrophes. This learningdepends on children’s explicit morpho-syntactic awareness, and the word ana-logy task tests this kind of awareness well because it requires children to makearbitrarily chosen syntactic transformations in an analogy task, and thus touse their morpho-syntactic knowledge explicitly. The sentence anagram andincomplete sentence tasks and the phoneme oddity task, in contrast, measuredifferent aspects of linguistic awareness which are important in reading and


spelling but are completely irrelevant as far as apostrophes are concerned.This is the most plausible explanation for our results.

Discussion

The study produced two clear conclusions. The first is that the apostropheis a formidable developmental hurdle in the English orthography. English-speaking children find it difficult to learn about the use of the apostropheto denote possession, and apparently this difficulty is due to a failure torecognise the morphemic distinction involved. Many of the children who didbadly in the spelling task used the apostrophe profusely: the trouble in theircase was that they used it with inappropriate words very nearly as often aswith appropriate ones. The children’s difficulties with the apostrophe per-sisted even after more than a year’s instruction; even then they made manymistakes.

Our second conclusion is about the factors which determine how well andhow soon children manage to surmount this hurdle. We found a specific andlong lasting connection between children’s morpho-syntactic awareness andtheir eventual success with apostrophes. This connection persists over morethan two years and remains significant after stringent controls for differencesin age, IQ and reading level. The connection can be said to be specific becausethe syntactic/semantic and the phonological measures, which are stronglyconnected to children’s reading, failed nonetheless to predict this aspect ofthe children’s literacy.

The discovery that a morpho-syntactic task predicts children’s use of theapostrophe, even after controls for differences in phonological awareness, isall the more remarkable given that this predictive task did not include anygenitive words. The result therefore suggests an independent form of lin-guistic awareness, which is awareness of morphemes. The connection is alsoexciting because the use of the apostrophe in English to denote possessionis pure morphology. The apostrophe only signifies a morpheme: it representsno sound. This may be why we were able to show a dissociation between thepredictive powers of the morpho-syntactic and the other linguistic awarenesstasks.

The general implication of our study is, therefore, that children’s linguisticawareness contributes to their progress in learning to read and spell in dif-ferent and possibly separable ways. Morpho-syntactic awareness, our resultssuggest, does play an important part in their knowledge of the conventionalspelling for morphemes, but phonological awareness does not. Other work(Goswami & Bryant 1990) suggests that phonological awareness affects chil-dren’s reading and spelling mainly through promoting their understanding of


the system of letter-sound correspondences. Both kinds of awareness mayaffect children’s general progress in reading and spelling, as our study shows,but they may do so in different ways. However, such separable and specificlinks could interact: we ourselves have claimed recently (Bryant, Nunes &Bindman 1997; Bryant, Nunes & Bindman 1999) that an initial problem withletter-sound correspondences may disrupt later learning of morphemicallybased spelling patterns.

Thus far our causal analysis has been one-way. We have argued as if chil-dren’s linguistic knowledge (phonological and morpho-syntactic) affects theirreading and spelling and not the other way round. Yet there is evidence nowthat, as far as children’s phonological knowledge is concerned, the directionof cause and effect goes both ways (Mann 1986; Morais, Cary, Alegria &Bertelson 1979; Morais, Bertelson, Cary & Alegria 1986; Morals, Alegria &Content 1987; Read, Zhang, Nie & Ding 1986). Children’s ability to makeexplicit phonological distinctions undoubtedly affects how well they learnabout letter-sound correspondences but this ability is also enhanced by theexperiences that they have while being taught to read and write.

The same may be true of morpho-syntactic awareness and reading andspelling. It is, for example, essential that children understand the distinctionbetween words which are genitive and words which are not, in order to usethe apostrophe appropriately. It is also possible that to some extent childrenlearn to make this morphemic distinction through the experience of beingtaught about the apostrophe. Data on this question in the form of interventionstudies or further longitudinal research should be easy to gather.

Whatever the direction of cause and effect, our data should serve as areminder of the connection between morpho-syntactic awareness and learn-ing about the conventional spelling for morphemes. Our results in this and inother studies suggest that these two aspects of language, which are normallykept at arm’s length from each other in the classroom, should be broughtmuch closer than that.

Acknowledgments

We are extremely grateful to the MRC (UK) which supported this project,and also to the staff and children in the Oxford schools taking part. Thesewere: Wolvercote First School, Botley Primary School, Cassington PrimarySchool, and Kennington Primary School.


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The relations between children's linguistic awareness and spelling: The case of the apostrophe

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