Morphology in children’s books: What’s there and what’s useful for learning?

The ability to break down complex words into smaller meaningful units (e.g., unhappy = un- + happy) is a vital part of skilled reading because it allows us to rapidly access the meanings of both known and unknown printed words. In English-speaking countries, children are rarely taught explicitly how these meaningful units, known as morphemes, function, and therefore must rely primarily on their reading experience to acquire morphological knowledge. To better understand what opportunities for morpheme learning reading experience provides, we analysed 1,200 books popular with British children aged 7–16. We found that, although a large proportion of words in children’s books consist of several morphemes,many morphologically complex words are low in frequency and poorly distributed across the books. This scarcity suggests that it will be challenging for children to learn to recognise many complex words by sight. Our data further show that children will often be unable to draw on their experience with complex words to learn the meanings and functions of the individual morphemes. Only a few affixes are used in many distinct words, and identifying morphemes in these words often requires sophisticated knowledge of word origins. This learning challenge is further compounded by the fact that the spellings of some complex words obscure their morphological structure, while some words are spelled in ways that might prompt incorrect morphological parsing. Together, these factors suggest that, beyond a handful of affixes, morpheme knowledge will be difficult to acquire from print alone. We discuss the implications of these findings for theories of morpheme learning and instructional programmes in morphology.