Grammatical awareness and the spelling of inflectional morphemes in Danish

Danish sixth-graders (N = 32, mean age 12: 7 years) were asked to spell words with inflectional endings which had grammatically unique but phonemically inconsistent spellings: present tense verbs and present participles. As found in a previous Danish study using pseudo-words (Juul and Elbro in press), such spellings were a major spelling problem. The present study shows that in spite of a weak intercorrelation, scores for both types of inflections correlate with grammatical awareness as measured through an 'odd word out' task. This supports the relevance of grammatical awareness for inflectional spelling competence, which has also been demonstrated in studies of English 8-to 10-year-olds (e.g. Nunes et al. 1997a). The present study extends previous findings by distinguishing awareness of two aspects of grammar: word class distinctions, related here to the spelling of present tense verbs, and inflections, related here to the spelling of participles. Thus, grammatical awareness and inflectional spelling competence appear to be heterogeneous concepts.