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

In a longitudinal study, we looked at the link between children's understanding of 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 in English. Early on in the study, we gave the children phonological, semantic/syntactic and morpho-syntactic awareness tasks, and later we gave them a spelling task in which they had to write words which were either genitives (e.g., 'boy's') or nominative or accusative plurals (e.g., 'boys'). Eight- to 10-year-old children found this task difficult, but their performance improved to some extent with age. The morpho-syntactic, but not the phonological or semantic/syntactic, awareness tasks predicted how well the children placed apostrophes in genitive words and omitted them from plural words. We conclude that different forms of linguistic awareness affect different aspects of reading and spelling. Learning about spelling patterns based on morphemes is heavily influenced by children's morpho-syntactic awareness but not, apparently, by other forms of linguistic awareness.