Morphological awareness and word-level reading in early and middle elementary school years

Abstract

We examined whether morphological awareness made a significant contribution to word-level reading across Grades 1 to 4. We test these relations specifically in a task measuring awareness of past-tense forms. A total of 375 children from Grades 1 to 4 completed tasks assessing past-tense morphological awareness along with real word and pseudoword reading. Children also completed control measures assessing phonological awareness, phonological short-term memory, sentence-level language skills, and nonverbal cognitive ability. After these controls, past-tense morphological awareness was a significant predictor of real word reading in Grades 1 and 2, but not in Grades 3 and 4. Further, following on all controls, past-tense morphological awareness was a consistent predictor of pseudoword reading across Grades 1 to 4. Morphological awareness, at least as measured with past-tense verbs, appears to have a role in word reading across the early to middle elementary school grades; for young readers, there are relations to reading of both known and novel words, and for older readers, relations are significant specifically in reading novel words. These findings are discussed within the context of theories of word reading development.

Morphological awareness predicts reading comprehension in first grade students

“…The morphological awareness task assessed inflectional morphology. English-speaking children are adept at the use and manipulation of inflections by first grade (e.g., Berko, 1958;de Villiers and de Villiers, 1973), though individual differences in inflectional morphological awareness remain (Muter et al, 2004;Robertson and Deacon, 2019). By comparison, first grade students' understanding of derivational morphology is limited (Anglin, 1993;Kuo and Anderson, 2006).…”

Longitudinal contributions of morphological awareness, listening comprehension, and gains in word reading fluency to later word- and text-reading fluency

“…These items stressed the meta-linguistic component of morphological awareness. Tasks with inflectional morphology were used to further tap into meta-cognitive awareness, as children this age have largely mastered implicit inflectional morphology (Robertson and Deacon, 2019). The Cronbach's alpha for this experimental task was 0.70.…”

“…First, the measure of morphological awareness included inflectional but not derivational morphology. This was judged appropriate as inflectional knowledge is more stable for the developmental period examined, and thus individual differences may more heavily tap meta-linguistic knowledge (see also Robertson and Deacon, 2019). However, derivational knowledge has been measured in this age range and further research is needed to test the generalizability of the current finings for this additional aspect of morphology.…”

Associations between morphological awareness and literacy skills in German primary school children: the roles of grade level, phonological processing and vocabulary

“…Internationally, pseudoword cloze tasks have been widely used to measure morphological awareness in children (e.g. Berko, 1958;Casalis & Louis-Alexandre, 2000;McBride-Chang et al, 2005;Robertson & Deacon, 2019;Robertson et al, 2013). Our pseudoword cloze task measures the ability to produce German inflections, derivations and compounds in a pseudoword context.…”