Phonological and morphological awareness in first graders

Abstract

Phonological awareness is thought to be related to children's success in learning to read because it indicates an awareness of the internal structure of words. Morphological awareness, which has been found to be related to reading achievement for older students, may offer a more comprehensive measure of linguistic sensitivity because it entails not only phonological awareness, but also other aspects of linguistic knowledge. The research study reported herein was designed to investigate the extent to which phonological awareness contributes to the morphological awareness of first graders and to determine the extent to which phonological and morphological awareness account for variance in word reading. Two tasks of morphological awareness were used, one assessing judgments of morphological relations and the other assessing the production of inflected and derived forms. The children were also given tests of phonological awareness, vocabulary, and word reading. Results showed that phonological awareness contributed significantly to performance on morphological awareness tasks; in addition, children with and without phonemic awareness differed significantly in their ability to produce morphologically complex words. Phonological awareness and morphological awareness contributed significantly to variance in word reading, although the contribution of phonological awareness was the larger of the two. Further studies are needed to investigate the impact of the delayed acquisition of phonological awareness on the development of morphological awareness and the relationship of morphological awareness to reading achievement over the school years.

Component processes of early reading, spelling, and narrative writing skills in Turkish: a longitudinal study

“…However, the research evidence into the role of grammatical awareness in early reading skills tends to be highly inconsistent. While some have reported small but reliable relationships (Carlisle, 1995;Carlisle & Nomanbhoy, 1993), others have found the effect of grammatical skills on reading to be either unreliable (Muter, et al, 2004) or indirect through its relationship with the phonological skills (Nikolopoulos, et al, 2006;Silven, et al, 2007). We now turn to the link between grammatical skills and spelling.…”

“…These findings should be evaluated with the recognition that morphological and phonological skills often show strong covariance suggesting reciprocal relationships between 8 these two linguistic skills and this can complicate a coherent analysis of their unique predictive role in literacy skills (Carlisle, 2000;Carlisle & Nomanbhoy, 1993). Furthermore, in agglutinative languages like Finnish and Turkish, the suffixation process draws the attention of the children to the final phoneme and internal phonemic structure of words, which can facilitate the development of phonological awareness skills (Durgunoğlu & Öney, 1999;Lyytinen & Lyytinen, 2004).…”

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

“…Early MA acquisition has been shown to be dependent on an individual's prereading PA, independent of vocabulary (Carlisle and Nomanbhoy, 1993;Cunningham and Carroll, 2015;Law et al, 2016). Chiat (2001) argued that as children are exposed to speech in context, they segment the target speech stream into available phonological components, which are capable of being generalized or related to the context at hand.…”

“…Studies have demonstrated that more complex phonological shifts between base and derived form are unattainable for many children first learning to read (e.g. divide and division, invade and invasion), while gains in PA and an increased sensitivity to the phonemic structure of language aid in the learning of morphophonemic rules, thus furthering morphological learning (Carlisle & Nomanbhoy, 1993). (Cavalli et al, 2016;Law et al, 2015).…”

Affix Acquisition Order in Serbian EFL Learners

“…Some of the most significant findings that have accumulated over the years include the following: pre-school children and first-graders have poor ability to produce appropriate derived forms (Berko 1958, Carlisle andNomanbhoy 1993); fourth-graders can recognize base morphemes in unfamiliar derivatives (Tyler and Nagy 1989), while eighth-graders can recognize the relationship between low frequency words and their suffixed derivatives (Wysocki and Jenkins 1987). According to Nagy et al (1993) mastering the use of affixation may continue well into high school, yet even adult native speakers seem to have incomplete knowledge of derivational morphology (Schmitt and Zimmerman 2002).…”