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Syllables and inflectional morphemes in early Finnish readers: evidence from eye-movements

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 May 2018

Tuomo HÄIKIÖ Open the ORCID record for Tuomo HÄIKIÖ [Opens in a new window]  and
Seppo VAINIO
Tuomo HÄIKIÖ*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of Turku
Seppo VAINIO
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of Turku
*
*Corresponding author: Tuomo Häikiö, Department of Psychology, University of Turku, FIN-20014 Turku, Finland. E-mail: tuilha@utu.fi
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Abstract

Finnish is a language with simple syllable structure but rich morphology. It was investigated whether syllables or morphemes are preferred processing units in early reading. To this end, Finnish first- and second-grade children read sentences with embedded inflected target words while their eye-movements were registered. The target words were either in essive or inessive/adessive (i.e., locative) case. The target words were either non-hyphenated, or had syllable-congruent or syllable-incongruent hyphenation. For the locatives, the syllable-incongruent hyphenation coincided with the morpheme boundary, but this was not the case for the essives. It was shown that the second-graders were slowed down by hyphenation to a larger extent than first-graders. However, there was no slowdown in gaze duration for either age group when the syllable-incongruent hyphen was morpheme-congruent. These findings suggest that Finnish readers already utilize morpheme-level information during the first grade.

Keywords

syllablesmorphemesreading development
Type
Brief Research Reports
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 45 , Issue 5 , September 2018 , pp. 1227 - 1245
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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