Unexpected poor comprehenders: An investigation of multiple aspects of morphological awareness

Abstract

Poor comprehenders have age-appropriate word reading skills but struggle with understanding what they read. The purpose of this study was to investigate how poor comprehenders perform on multiple aspects of morphological awareness, a skill implicated in reading comprehension. In keeping with current research and theory, we look at three aspects of morphological awareness: morphological structure awareness, morphological analysis and morphological decoding. Using a regression-based approach, we identified 64 poor and average comprehenders out of a large sample of children in grade 3. Our results show that poor comprehenders and average comprehenders performed remarkably similar on morphological structure awareness, analysis, and decoding. Poor comprehenders performed more poorly than average comprehenders only on word analogy, a specific measure of morphological awareness. These results identify an area with which poor comprehenders are likely to struggle, while simultaneously providing evidence for areas of relative strength within this population. HighlightsWhat is already known about this topic • Poor comprehenders are individuals who have age-appropriate word reading and phonological processing skills, but have specific impairments in understanding text • Poor comprehenders seem to have impairments in certain aspects of morphological awarenessWhat this paper adds• Here, we investigated the one aspect of morphological awareness studied in past research, but with a larger sample size. This allowed us to clarify mixed results of past research • We also investigated two other aspects of morphological awareness, morphological analysis and morphological decoding, that have not yet been studied in poor comprehenders

The relations between morphological awareness and reading comprehension in beginner readers to young adolescents

“…Like some previous studies (e.g., Berninger et al, 2010; Deacon & Kirby, 2004; MacKay et al, 2017), the reliability of some of our morphological awareness tasks was low (<.70). This may reflect the wide range of modifying relationships (for compounds) and parts of speech (for compounds, inflections and derivations) that we included as items to provide a comprehensive assessment of this construct.…”

“…In contrast, no impairments were found on an analogy task measuring inflectional morphology, nor on a sentence completion task to assess morphological knowledge, which provided syntactic support. The relative specificity of poor comprehenders' difficulties to derivational morphology and its task‐dependent nature has been replicated (Tong, Deacon, & Cain, 2014; MacKay, Levesque, & Deacon, 2017), supporting the proposal that derivational knowledge could be a key contributor to comprehension problems. Inflectional knowledge, in contrast, seems to be relatively intact for poor comprehenders, with some evidence that irregular inflections may pose an additional challenge for this group (Adlof & Catts, 2015; Nation, Snowling, & Clarke, 2005).…”

Understanding poor comprehenders in different orthographies: Universal versus language‐specific skills

“…First, poor comprehenders emerge across a wide age range within both alphabetic and non‐alphabetic languages. Specifically, we have shown that reading comprehension difficulties occur in English monolingual children (MacKay, Levesque, & Deacon, ) and adults (Cartwright, Bock, Coppage, Hodgkiss, & Nelson, ), as well as in bilingual L2 children learning either English or French (D'Angelo & Chen, ; Zhang & Shulley, ). Furthermore, poor comprehenders can have co‐occurring difficulties across their two languages.…”

“…The first relies on discrepancies (Cartwright et al, ; Choi et al, ; Zhang & Shulley, ), which selects children who have reading comprehension scores below a cut point and word reading scores above a cut point, both based on standard scores. The second is the regression‐based approach, which considers other possible reading‐related variables when selecting poor comprehenders (D'Angelo & Chen, ; MacKay et al, ). One challenge with relying solely on reading comprehension and word reading for discrepancies is that it does not take into account other possible causes of reading comprehension difficulties, such as vocabulary.…”

“…Although oral language skill deficits are evident in poor comprehenders across languages, little is known about which aspects of oral language comprehension skills really account for poor reading comprehension. As an example, Mackay et al () showed that only a specific measure of derivational morphological structure awareness differentiated poor from average comprehenders in English. Interestingly, the picture is much more complex in the study by D'Angelo and Chen ().…”