Sensitivity to morphological spelling regularities in Chinese-English bilinguals and English monolinguals

Evidence of sensitivity to graphotactic and morphological patterns in English spelling has been extensively examined in monolinguals. Comparatively few studies have examined bilinguals’ sensitivity to spelling regularities. The present study compared late Chinese-English bilinguals and English monolinguals on their sensitivity to systematic inflectional and derivational spelling regularities. One hundred and twenty-nine undergraduate students completed a forced-choice spelling task, in which nonword pairs were presented in a sentence context requiring a choice of the relevant grammatical form. English ability measures were administered to examine possible inter-individual differences in morphological sensitivity. The results showed that both monolingual and bilingual participants demonstrated knowledge of spelling patterns, but the groups differed in their sensitivity to inflectional and derivational spelling regularities. Specifically, bilinguals showed more consistent use of morphological spelling regularities in guiding their decision on spelling choice compared to monolinguals. The results are argued to be consistent with the predictions of statistical learning accounts of spelling acquisition.