Morphological awareness and vocabulary predict reading resilience in adults

Abstract

Resilient readers comprehend written language despite word reading deficits. The reading resiliency framework specifies candidate protective factors hypothesized to mitigate adverse effects on reading comprehension arising from phonological decoding deficiencies and, consequently, illuminates how some individuals exhibit relative reading resiliency. A focus on relative reading resiliency involves an examination of individual strengths and weaknesses because areas of relative strength can bolster one's abilities. The ability for morphological awareness and vocabulary to be strengths or protective factors contributing to reading resiliency was explored in a sample of university students. Morphological awareness is predicted to be a particularly important skill for university students due to the complexity of texts encountered in their coursework. A measure of word-level morphological awareness was positively associated with relative reading resiliency. Furthermore, across norm-referenced and standardized high-stakes testing measures of reading comprehension, vocabulary mediated the impact of morphological awareness on comprehension after controlling for phonological decoding ability. These findings suggest that morphological awareness and vocabulary skills are important contributing factors to reading comprehension and reading resilience.

Reading and spelling profiles of adult poor readers: Phonological, orthographic and morphological considerations

“…Specifically, people in the poor reading group had greater difficulty recognizing noun and adjective suffixes, compared to skilled readers. Previous studies on morphological awareness have found similar results, with individuals with reading difficulties performing poorly on tasks involving identification and manipulation of morphemic units (Bruck, 1993;Deacon, Parrila, & Kirby, 2006;Farris et al, 2021;Leong & Parkinson, 1995;Schiff & Raveh, 2007).…”

“…While skilled readers likely rely more heavily on the lexical processing pathways, it is well established that these pathways do operate in a parallel fashion that is NOT independent (Paap & Noel, 1991). Much of the adult literature that explores MA and OA, does so in the context of reading comprehension (Farris et al, 2021; Kotzer et al, 2021), which likely requires a more complex integration of each of PA, OA and MA processes for successful completion. However, a lack of power cannot be ruled out, given the small sample size utilized here, and thus the null effects for OA and MA must be interpreted with caution.…”

“…Besides, working on these skills can also positively impact higher-order skills of reading comprehension, vocabulary, and so forth. (Farris et al, 2021;Goodwin & Ahn, 2010). Yet, it should be acknowledged that phonological awareness treatment may need to be adapted and modified to meet the needs of adult learners.…”

“…These exceptions make the English language a complex language system. There is some evidence that there is a strong positive association between morphological skills and reading and spelling performance in both children and adults (Farris, Cristan, Bernstein, & Odegard, 2021; Kotzer, Kirby, & Heggie, 2021; Tsesmeli & Seymour, 2006, see Casani, Vulchanova, & Cardinaletti, 2022 for similar relationship between morphosyntax and reading in a shallow orthographic language). In children, morphological awareness supports decoding skills, word recognition, and word comprehension (Mahony, Singson, & Mann, 2000; Nagy, Berninger, & Abbott, 2006).…”

“…Similar to OA, there is mixed evidence as to whether adults with literacy impairments also have deficits in morphological knowledge. Some researchers have reported that impaired morphological awareness is tightly coupled with reading impairments (Bruck, 1993; Kotzer et al, 2021; Martin, Frauenfelder, & Pascale, 2014; Schiff & Raveh, 2007; Tsesmeli & Seymour, 2006), while others have suggested morphological knowledge to be adequate and even a potential compensatory mechanism in children and adults with reading impairments (Bitan, Weiss, Katzir, & Truzman, 2020; Carlisle, 1987; Cavalli, Duncan, Elbro, El Ahmadi, & Colé, 2017; Farris et al, 2021; Fowler & Liberman, 1995; Law et al, 2015; Leong & Parkinson, 1995). Again, the extent to which the differences in the findings can be attributed to the orthographic depth of language or the stimuli characteristics, in addition to a lack of consensus on how to measure morphological knowledge, all remain unclear.…”