Invented words after writing intervention: Elementary student production of morphological inventions in two writing contexts

Abstract

Morphological inventions are an area of language development that has received limited attention. The present study examines pretest-posttest data from a 2-cohort randomized study of a 12-week writing-focused morphology instruction intervention for fourth and fifth graders compared to a business-as-usual control condition. Specifically, two writing tasks, sentence combining and text generation, were used to assess morphological derivations and inventions. Results of aptitude-by-treatment interaction ANOVA models showed that, while the intervention had no main effect on morphological inventions in the less constrained task (sentence combining), there was a treatment by grade interaction on inventions for instructed words. Students used more morphological derivations, both in correct and invented words, on transfer word items in the more constrained task (morphological production). Results of this study show that instruction in morphological knowledge increases student use of invented words on constrained tasks, and transparency of derived words relates to invention usage.