On the Role of Spelling in Morpheme Recognition: Experimental Studies with Children and Adults

INTRODUCTION Over the past half century or so, the field of linguistics in North America has largely been dominated by what Scinto (1986) terms the "phonocentric canon ." The often unquestioned and unstated assumption of this canon is that "the voice is somehow primary and central to language and, by implication, other instantiations of language are only secondary reflections of the voice" (p. 2). Such a bias is clearly reflected in the Bloomfieldian dictum that "[W]riting is not language, but merely a way of recording language by means of visible marks" (Bloomfield, 1933, p. 21).