Morphological constancy in spelling: A comparison of children with dyslexia and typically developing children

The spellings of many English words follow a principle of morphological constancy. For example, musician includes the c of music, even though the pronunciation of this letter changes. With other words, such as explanation and explain, the spellings of morphemes are not retained when affixes are added. We asked whether children with dyslexia use root morphemes to aid their spelling of morphologically complex words. If so, they should sometimes produce misspellings such as 'explaination' for explanation. Our results suggest that children with dyslexia adhere to the principle of morphological constancy to the same extent as typically developing younger children of the same spelling level. In this and other ways, the spellings of older dyslexic children are remarkably similar to those of typical younger children.