Morphology in children’s books, and what it means for learning

Maria Korochkina; Kathleen Rastle

doi:10.1038/s41539-025-00313-6

Morphology in children’s books, and what it means for learning

Maria Korochkina
, Kathleen Rastle

Royal Holloway, University of London

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

4 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Breaking down complex words into smaller meaningful units (e.g., unhappy = un- + happy), known as morphemes, is vital for skilled reading as it allows readers to rapidly compute word meanings. There is agreement that children rely on reading experience to acquire morphological knowledge in English; however, the nature of this experience has remained unclear. We quantify the morphological information in 1200 popular children’s books and offer the first concrete description of how readers may learn affix morphemes through real-life text input. Our account considers the realities of morpheme presentation in natural language, such as the low number of distinct words in which affixes appear and the fact that their identification often requires specialised linguistic knowledge. This theory further accounts for the challenge posed by spelling patterns that may lead to incorrect morphological parsing. We conclude by exploring the implications of our findings for instructional programmes in morphology.

Original language	English
Article number	22
Number of pages	16
Journal	npj Science of Learning
Volume	10
Early online date	5 May 2025
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1038/s41539-025-00313-6
Publication status	E-pub ahead of print - 5 May 2025

Bibliographical note

© The Author(s) 2025 This article is licensed under a Creative CommonsAttribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Data Access Statement

The online version contains supplementary material available at https://doi.org/10.1038/s41539-025-00313-6.

Data availability - All data analysed in this article are publicly available. Links to the data are provided in the Methods section of this article and in this project’s reposi-
tory on the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/vab95/.

Code availability - The code for all analyses is available in this project’s repository on the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/vab95/.

Access to Document

10.1038/s41539-025-00313-6Licence: CC BY 4.0

Morphology in children’s books, and what it means for learning
© The Author(s) 2025 This article is licensed under a Creative CommonsAttribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Final published version, 1.62 MBLicence: CC BY 4.0

Cite this

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Morphology in children’s books, and what it means for learning

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Data Access Statement

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