Phonological and morphological analysis skills in young children

Twenty-two normally developing five-year-olds were asked to judge, identify, repair and explain phonological and morphological errors. All of the errors involved the addition, substitution or omission of a single phoneme, which in the morphological task, was also an inflectional morpheme. Stimuli were controlled for type of error (omission, addition, substitution), location of the error (word final) and word status of the resulting error (word, non-word). Children performed significantly better on the phonological task than on the morphological task. It is proposed that the results are due to differences in the type and location of linguistic information to be analysed and to differences in memory demands in the tasks.