No abstract

The purpose of this study was twofold: to create a measure of morphological awareness with college students and to examine effects of morphological awareness on literacy abilities. Three morphological awareness measures, and spelling, word reading, and sentence comprehension tasks were administered to 214 undergraduate college students. Item Response Theory analyses generated a 24-item, validated morphological awareness measure. Path analysis revealed that morphological awareness was a strong predictor of spelling with a standardized path coefficient of .77, and a moderate predictor of word reading and sentence comprehension, with standardized path coefficients of .62 and .58, respectively. Both spelling and word reading were partial mediators of relations between morphological awareness and sentence comprehension. The standardized indirect effect of morphological awareness on sentence comprehension was .38 through spelling and .13 through word reading. A valid morphological awareness measure now exists for use with college students. Morphological awareness is a stronger predictor for spelling than for word reading and sentence comprehension.

We examined the acquisition of initial mental graphemic representations (MGRs) by 46 kindergarten children (mean age = 5 years, 9 months) at risk for literacy development because of low socioeconomic status. Using a storybook context, we exposed children to novel nonwords that varied in their phonotactic and orthotactic probabilities and then assessed the children's development of initial MGRs through spelling and reading recognition tasks. The children developed some initial MGRs but less than past reports of children from middle socioeconomic status backgrounds. Children with more advanced word recognition abilities developed more initial MGRs than their peers with less advanced word recognition skills. Like previous reports, the words' linguistic properties affected initial MGR acquisition and MGR acquisition ability predicted reading and spelling achievement above other known predictors. The results speak to the importance of increasing the print and orthographic knowledge of children at-risk for adequate literacy development.

No abstract