How Do French Children Use Morphosyntactic Information when They Spell Adverbs and Present Participles?

This study examined how French third (36) and fifth (36) graders used the morphosyntactic context when they spell morphologically complex words with homophonous suffixes (/a/). Participants had to spell adverbs (/a/ transcribed ent) and present participles (/a/ transcribed ant), contrasted on the basis of their frequency, in isolation or embedded within a sentence. Spelling performances were better when the words were dictated in the context of a sentence than in a condition of isolated word dictation. This was the case even in Grade 3, despite the fact that explicit teaching about the transcription of the suffixes /a/ had been provided only to the fifth graders. The frequency of target words was an important determinant of spelling success even when a sentence context was provided. Thus, even though children benefited from the morphosyntactic information provided by the sentence, they did not rely (systematically) on a morphological rule such as "words ending with /a/ are always given the ant spelling after the preposition en (e.g., en regardant "in looking")."