Introduction to This Special Issue: The Role of Morphology in Learning to Read

Reading involves the decoding of written forms into language forms that represent phonological, morphological, and word level units. Thus, orthographies convey not only phonological but also morphological information-the word roots, syntactic inflections, and derivational relations that constitute the minimal semantic and grammatical units of a language. There are many psycholinguistic issues brought to light by the facts about morphology. However, the central one has focused on decomposition-whether and how language users, including readers, decompose morphologically complex words into their constituent morphemes.