Morpheme
This ANR DFG project brings together experts from cognitive psychology, education and computer science to investigate the development of reading skills in a unique cross-language longitudinal fashion, from Kindergarten all the way to the end of primary school. The principal focus of our research is on words comprising multiple morphemes (teach + er). Despite extensive research in adults, we still know very little about how and when morphological knowledge becomes incorporated into the reading system. We will explore the acquisition of morphological knowledge based on a 3x3 longitudinal test-battery including experimental paradigms such as auditory lexical decision, masked priming and eye-tracking. The strength of this project is not only that it brings together experts from different fields to work on the exploration of cognitive variables (e.g., phonological awareness and vocabulary growth) influencing reading development in young children, but also inspires cross-linguistic aspects of language learning. We aim to compare the development of morphological processing in German and French cross-linguistically, two languages that differ fundamentally in terms of word length, frequency and morphological productivity, which will provide important insights into the developing German and French reading systems. The experimental outcomes will then be used to test the Connectionist Dual Process model of reading aloud (CDP++; Perry, Ziegler, & Zorzi, 2010) and to implement a novel connectionist model of the acquisition of morpho-orthographic representations during learning to read. The expected results are not only crucial for understanding the fundamental processes of reading development, but also have the potential to be of great value to children with language and reading deficits, speech pathologists and educational psychologists.