This study examines the use of braille contractions in a longitudinal corpus of spelling tests from braille-reading children in grades 1-4, with particular attention to braille contractions that create mismatches with morphological structure. Braille is a tactile writing system that enables people who are blind or visually impaired to read and write. However, In English and many other languages, reading and writing braille is not a matter of simply transliterating between print letters and their braille equivalents. Unified English braille (the official braille system used in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and several other countries) contains 180 contractions—one or more braille cells that represent whole words or strings of letters. In some words, the prescriptive rules for correct braille usage cause contractions to bridge morphological boundaries and to obscure the spellings of stems and affixes. We demonstrate that, when the prescriptive rules for correct braille usage flout morphological structure, young braille spellers significantly follow the morphology rather than the orthographic rules. This work establishes that morphology matters for young braille learners. The Braille Challenge is an annual academic contest sponsored by the Braille Institute of America to promote the learning and use of braille. The contest is open to braille-reading students in grades 1 through 12 who reside in the United States and Canada, and is divided into five levels by grade: Apprentice (1st and 2nd grade), Freshman (3rd and 4th grade), Sophomore (5th and 6th grade), Junior Varsity (7th, 8th, and 9th grade), and Varsity (10th, 11th, and 12th grade). Some students are allowed to participate below grade level, for instance if they are new to braille after having begun their schooling as print readers, or if they have additional circumstances classifying them as reading significantly below grade level; these students’ contests are flagged as ‘below grade level’ and are excluded from our analysis. Approximately 1,000 students from across all grade levels participate annually in the Preliminaries, which take place during the first quarter of the calendar year, either as regional events or individually proctored in a local school by a student’s TVI. The top ten scorers from each of the five contest levels then compete in the Braille Challenge Finals in June, which typically take place in person near the Braille Institute headquarters in Los Angeles, California. Finalists generally have all travel expenses covered through local and national fund raising, and top finalists receive awards, which may include prizes such as savings bonds. The Braille Challenge serves as a source of motivation to learn and use braille, contributes to students’ pride in braille literacy, and celebrates student achievement. Each year’s Braille Challenge contest consists of a series of written tests, which are identical for all students at the same level. Three of these tests involve reading braille and answering a series of multiple-choice questions: Proofreading, Reading Comprehension, and interpretation of Charts and Graphs. A fourth test involves writing braille: Spelling for students at the Apprentice and Freshman levels, and Speed and Accuracy (writing passages in braille from dictation) for the Sophomore through Varsity levels. All students write their test responses in hardcopy braille using 6-key input on a Perkins Brailler, a typewriter-like device which has been the standard means of writing braille in the United States and Canada since the 1950s. The hardcopy answers are scored regionally, and then mailed to the Braille Institute where they are checked and used for determining the students who will compete in the Finals. Our research team is currently digitizing the hard copy responses from seven years of Braille Challenge contests, 2017-2023, which will comprise the Braille Challenge Research Corpus. The analyses reported here focus on the spelling contests from at-grade-level students in the 2018, 2019, and 2020 Apprentice Level Preliminaries (grades 1-2), and the spelling contests from the 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021 Freshman Level Preliminaries (grades 3-4). These are the years that are currently available in the corpus. We focus on the Preliminaries since these reflect the full range and diversity of spellers at each level. As is typical for English spelling tests for blind and visually-impaired students, learners are expected to write each word in both contracted and uncontracted braille. The rationale for this reflects the reality of most braille users’ literacy needs: students need to know the print (uncontracted) spelling of a word for typing on a QWERTY keyboard and communicating with the broader print-based world; and students need to know the contracted form, as this is what the student encounters while reading, and is what the student must produce when writing braille. Each spelling test in the Braille Challenge Preliminaries contests contains 40 items, selected by a group of TVI’s to reflect a relatively challenging set of words for students at each level. The spelling tests take place with one or more students, each of whom is provided a Perkins Brailler and several sheets of paper. A test proctor reads the instructions to the students, administers the test, and collects the papers. Proctors follow a strict written protocol for administering the spelling tests. The proctor reads the word aloud, then reads a sentence containing the word, and then reads the word a final time, after which the student writes the word in braille. In the instructions before the test begins, students are directed to write each word in uncontracted braille followed by contracted braille. (If the word has no contractions, then the student only writes the uncontracted form.) Students are told that if they wish to make a correction, they should rewrite the word, and only the last instance will be counted. For our analysis, we take the final production of a word without any contractions as the uncontracted response, and the final production of a word with at least one contraction as the contracted response—and these are also the responses which the Braille Challenge scorers count.