JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL CHILD PSYCHOLOGY 63, 141–170 (1996) ARTICLE NO. 0045 Effects of Morphology on Children’s Spelling of Final Consonant Clusters REBECCA TREIMAN AND MARIE CASSAR Wayne State University Most research on children’s spelling has emphasized the role of phonological or sound-based processes. We asked whether morphology plays a part in early spelling by examining how children write words with final consonant clusters. In three experi- ments, children made different patterns of omission errors on the last two consonants of words such as tuned and bars, in which the consonants belong to different mor- phemes, and words such as brand and Mars, in which the consonants belong to the same morpheme. These differences emerged even among children reading at the first- grade level. Effects of morphology appeared whether children spelled single words to dictation (Experiments 1 and 3), finished partially completed spellings (Experiment 2), or wrote sentences containing specified words (Experiment 3). Children did not use morphological relations among words as much as they could have, given their knowledge of the stems, but they did use them to some extent. Although phonology plays an important role in early spelling, young children can also use other sources of information, including certain morphological relationships among words.  1996 Academic Press, Inc. As writing begins to play a larger role in the early elementary school curriculum, it becomes important to understand how children approach the writing task. One way to address this question is to divide the complex skill of writing into simpler components and to study children’s learning of each component. We focus here on one aspect of writing, spelling. Spelling is important because children who spell poorly or laboriously are unable to devote their full attention to higher-order writing processes (e.g., Bereiter, This research was supported by NSF Grants SBR-9020956 and SBR-9408456. We thank Patrick Lavery, E. Daylene Richmond-Welty, and Sarah Weatherston for their help with the research, and Ruth Tincoff and three anonymous reviewers for comments on a draft of the manuscript. We are grateful to the principals, teachers, and students of St. Joan of Arc Elementary School and St. Veronica’s Elementary School for their help. Address reprint requests to Rebecca Treiman, Department of Psychology, Wayne State University, 71 West Warren Avenue, Detroit, MI 48202. 0022-0965/96 $18.00 Copyright  1996 by Academic Press, Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. 141