ABSTRACT
Many spelling rules are based on morphemes. Such rules abound in English spelling and in other orthographies as well. They are the main reason why we have to study children's ability to learn about morphological as well as about phonological rules in spelling. These rules govern the relationship between spelling on the one hand and inflectional and derivational morphemes on the other. Children initially find some derivational suffixes extremely hard to spell despite the fact that they occur quite frequently. In the process of acquiring knowledge about morphology, children go through a phase when they spell some words worse than they did before, at the same time spelling others better than they did before. Our studies that led us to this conclusion are described in this chapter. In this chapter, we also address the question of how children learn about morphological spellings: Do they learn through formal and informal instruction or through their own discoveries? This implicit—explicit distinction is the next great problem to solve for researchers on children's morphological spelling. It is already clear that children's knowledge of morphemes and of its impact on spelling rules plays a significant and interesting part in their learning to read and to spell. Now we need to know what and how to tell children about these rules.
