Children’s morphological awareness and reading ability

Abstract

We investigated the effects of morphological awareness on five measures of reading in 103 children from Grades 1 to 3. Morphological awareness was assessed with a word analogy task that included a wide range of morphological transformations. Results indicated that the new measure had satisfactory reliability, and that morphological awareness was a significant predictor of word reading accuracy and speed, pseudoword reading accuracy, text reading speed, and reading comprehension, after controlling the effects of verbal and nonverbal ability and phonological awareness. Morphological awareness also explained variance in reading comprehension after further controlling word reading. We conclude that morphological awareness has important roles in word reading and reading comprehension, and we suggest that it should be included more frequently in assessments and instruction.

Early development and predictors of morphological awareness: Disentangling the impact of decoding skills and phonological awareness

“…The results of this study are unique as they provide evidence of one possible directional path where reading skill can be seen as influencing later MA whereas past correlational and longitudinal research has demonstrated the opposite situation where MA has been found to predict later reading achievement (Carlisle, 2000;Deacon & Kirby, 2004;Kirby et al, 2012;Roman et al, 2009). Taken together, the findings of this study offers support for the bi-directional relationship between word reading skills and MA as proposed by Deacon, Benere, and Pasquarella (2013).…”

“…Studies have demonstrated that an awareness of morphemes, the smallest linguistic units retaining meaning, contributes to word recognition, spelling, and reading comprehension, independent of orthographic processing, phonological awareness, RAN, and vocabulary (Carlisle, 2000;Casalis & Louis-Alexandre, 2000;Deacon & Kirby, 2004;Kirby et al, 2012;Roman, Kirby, Parrila, Wade-Woolley, & Deacon, 2009). …”

Influência da consciência morfológica na leitura e na escrita: uma revisão sistemática de literatura

“…By analyzing the results of each article included in the review, positive correlations can be observed between morphological awareness tests and reading and writing skills. Furthermore, a relationship between morphological awareness and the speed of reading and word identification was observed (19) . Taking the relevant limitations into account, most of the studies consider, respectively, the need for tests with greater validity and reliability for the assessment of morphological awareness (22,26) , as well as the need for inclusion of tests for later control of phonological awareness, vocabulary, and general knowledge, thus reducing the increase of influences and confounding factors (12,18,21,24,31) .…”

“…There was a predominance of grammatical analogy tests, morphological decision, and creation of neologisms for assessment of morphological awareness; and testing of receptive vocabulary with pictures and WISC III digit span tests for assessment of vocabulary (19,21,23,25,26) . The predominant use of tests of grammatical analogy, morphological decision, and creation of neologisms to evaluate morphological awareness corroborates recent studies in Brazilian Portuguese (9,21) that have tested such evidence through appropriate statistical analysis and concluded that they present greater evidence of validity to assess the morphological awareness skill, however with differentiated levels of correlation for each school grade and component assessed (derivational or inflectional morphology).…”

“…Some studies (19,23,26) also considered the use of phonological awareness tests together with the application of multivariate statistical analyses to control the influence of phonological awareness on the results, since this could be positively influencing reading performance (28,29) and, consequently, masking performance in the morphological awareness skill. Another skill controlled (21,23) by means of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children -WISC III (30) was cognitive development.…”