Publication

Abstract : The phonological and morphological structure of language impacts reading and spelling acquisition in both typically developing and struggling learners, as evidenced by various studies which list syllable saliency, phoneme position, and word structure complexity as factors influencing the development of phonological and morphological awareness. However, for the most part, these studies have been confined to English and a handful of other mainly European languages written in alphabetic Roman-based writing systems and their results may not be representative of the approximately 4,000 written languages that exist today. The present work sheds new light on the roles of phonology and morphology in literacy acquisition by examining Malayalam, a South Asian language spoken by some 35 million people and written in a non-alphabetic akshara script that is nearly a thousand years old. A study of the responses of 505 Malayali students (ages 6–17 years) in reading and spelling tests revealed eight dimensions of phonological and morphological complexity that were found to be sources of reading and spelling difficulty. The four phonological dimensions include vowel length, gemination, phoneme similarity, and syllable complexity, while the four morphological dimensions comprise declensions and allomorphs, sandhi, compounds and blends, and the prevalence of polymorphemic words. Malayalam shares close ties to Tamil and Sanskrit-derived Indic languages, and the dimensions identified in this study may be applicable to many languages of the Indian subcontinent and to the Brahmi-derived akshara scripts used by nearly two billion people throughout South and Southeast Asia. Indeed, some of the dimensions appear to affect literacy learning in languages as varied as Arabic, Finnish, French, and Basque. Thus, the present study moves the field a step further toward the overarching goal of developing a comprehensive theory of how the phonological and morphological structures of languages around the globe impact reading and spelling acquisition.