ABSTRACT
English morphophonemic spelling is especially problematic for two groups of people learning to read English: native English-speaking children and English as a Second Language (ESL)/English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students. After an examination of English morphology, pronunciation, and spelling, this chapter looks briefly at morphology in other languages, the possibility that different languages require different morphological processing strategies. Phonological changes from a base word to a derived word are a problem for writing. The problem is that the orthographic system represents both phonemes and morphemes. In other words, English orthography is phonemic in that it represents the sounds of the language. L1 morphology may interfere with word recognition in L2. Polysynthetic languages have words that are made up of many morphemes. Agglutinating languages have words with many morphemes that are easy to segment into separable morphemes within a word. Schreuder and Baayen propose that different language-specific characteristics of morphology may affect the way that the mental lexicon is organized.
