Inferring Meaning From Meaningful Parts: The Contributions of Morphological Skills to the Development of Children's Reading Comprehension

Abstract

Skilled reading comprehension is an important goal of educational instruction and models of reading development. In this study, the authors investigated how core skills surrounding morphemes, that is, the minimal units of meaning in language, support the development of reading comprehension. The authors specifically contrast the roles of morphological awareness and morphological analysis; the first refers to the awareness of and ability to manipulate morphemes in language, and the second refers to the use of morphemes in inferring the meaning of unfamiliar morphologically complex (multimorphemic) words. The authors evaluated these morphological skills in 197 English‐speaking students who were followed from grade 3 to grade 4; the analyses used stringent autoregressor controls to home in on predictors of gains over time. In addition to morphological awareness and morphological analysis, the authors assessed students' reading comprehension and controls for word reading, vocabulary, phonological awareness, nonverbal ability, and age. Multivariate autoregressive path analysis revealed that morphological analysis, but not morphological awareness, predicted gains in reading comprehension. Morphological awareness, for its part, predicted gains in morphological analysis. Taken together, the findings allude to a developmental trajectory whereby students' use of morphemes to infer the meanings of unfamiliar complex words supports the development of reading comprehension over time. The development of this skill, in turn, appears to be supported by a more general awareness of morphemes in language. These findings contribute to theory and reading instruction by clarifying the ways in which morphological skills support the development of students' reading comprehension.

Teachers' knowledge about language constructs related to literacy skills and student achievement in low socio‐economic status schools

“…The findings from this study regarding the various aspects of morphology mirror the findings of previous studies (Moats, ; Washburn et al, , ; Washburn et al, ) and bring to light a major weakness of the teachers in our study located in low SES schools. Morphological awareness, including knowledge of morpheme analysis and morpheme counting, influences students' reading comprehension and vocabulary (Aaron, Joshi, & Quatroche, ; Carlisle, ; Goodwin, Petscher, Carlisle, & Mitchell, ; Levesque, Kieffer, & Deacon, in press). For example, students can learn to read and comprehend thousands of words when given the knowledge of a relatively small amount of Greek and Latin roots and instruction on recognizing these meaningful parts in words they encounter while reading.…”

The Effect of Explicit English Morphology Instruction on EFL Secondary School Students’ Morphological Awareness and Reading Comprehension

“…The results demonstrated that morphological awareness contributed to reading comprehension. Levesque, Kieffer, and Deacon (2018) investigated how core skills surrounding morphemes support the development of reading comprehension among English speaking students. The findings demonstrated that students' use of morphemes to infer the meanings of unfamiliar complex words supported the development of reading comprehension.…”

Morphological Intervention in Promoting Higher-Order Reading Abilities among College-Level Second Language Learners

“…However, the outcome measurements capitalized on explicit but decontextualized morphological knowledge and did not fully capture their analytical ability in context. Morphological awareness/knowledge by itself involves the explicit abstraction of partial word form and meaning [29], which occurs mostly in a decontextualized fashion, whereas morphological analysis taps into the learner's ability to use specific word parts to retrieve the whole-word meaning [30]. Although the intervention covered both morphological awareness building and morphological analysis in context, the participating students may have been responsive to the straightforward decomposition and identification of morphemic cues rather than to the complicated morphological applications and use in context.…”