Objectives: Morphological awareness refers to the ability to recognize and manipulate the smallest meaningful structure of words. Recent studies have shown that morphological awareness is particularly relevant for understanding language development, especially vocabulary knowledge, and reading skills. The purpose of this study was to investigate the mediating effect of vocabulary knowledge on the relationship between morphological awareness and reading comprehension. Methods: Participants in this study were 278 children in first through sixth grade of two elementary schools in a Metropolitan city. Tests of morphological awareness on derived affixes, receptive vocabulary and reading comprehension were carried out. In order to estimate the mediating effect, correlation analysis and regression analysis were conducted using the Baron & Kanny and Sobel test. Results: In our results, morphological awareness significantly predicted reading comprehension. The partial mediating effect of vocabulary was also showed throughout the elementary grade group. Conclusion: Our findings show that morphological awareness contributes to reading comprehension indirectly through language systems such as vocabulary knowledge. These results suggested that skilled morphological awareness competence may have an impact on enhancing vocabulary acquisition and eventually academic reading skills which are based on language skills. Also, the need for vocabulary intervention, including deep and rich morphological instruction, was discussed. Limitations and suggestions were also added.

Objectives The purpose of this study was to investigate the growth of acquisition of derivatives and the effectiveness of two intervention approaches; contextual versus morphological inference interventions. Methods In this study, forty-two 2nd to 3rd-grade elementary students were divided into two groups and each group respectively completed either a contextual interference intervention program or a morphological interference intervention program. As the program aimed to assess the efficacy of meaning acquisition in derivatives, they were implemented in two second-grade classroom and two third-grade classrooms, centering on the learning of four ‘prefix-root’ words and six ‘root-suffix’ words. Results Results showed that both programs were effective in the meaning acquisition, showing no meaningful difference between the contextual and morphological inference programs. There were no disparities according to grades and programs as well. Such results imply that in terms of vocabulary acquisition, morphological interference intervention programs are as fruitful as the previously validated contextual interference intervention programs. Conclusions This may be elucidated by the developmental features of second to third-grade children, whose morphological awareness as well as their semantic interference and monitoring ability are in the course of maturity. Meanwhile, the children in each program also showed rather different reactions. While the children of the contextual interference program were shown to conjugate their newly acquired vocabularies in different contexts regularly, children from the morphological interference program displayed frequent morphological analysis, concentrating on both partial and general meaning.

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