Abstract
Studies investigating relations between morphological awareness and literacy in German, a language with a rather transparent but asymmetric orthography, are sparse. Little is known about the role of grade level for these relationships and of their relative strength compared to those between other language-related variables and literacy skills. This cross-sectional study was conducted with German-speaking second-, third- and fourth-graders (n of final sample ≥ 85 per grade). Morphological awareness tasks required the production of inflections, derivations and compounds. Additionally, phonological processing, vocabulary, reading fluency, reading comprehension and spelling were measured. Factor analyses revealed two facets of morphological awareness: morphological fluency and morphological awareness for pseudowords. These were correlated with both reading and spelling skills in all grades. More literacy variables were related to morphological fluency in Grade 4 than in Grades 2 and 3. In regression analyses, variance in literacy skills was predominantly explained by phonological awareness. Morphological awareness did not explain additional variance. The results reveal that different facets of morphological awareness are related to literacy skills in German primary school children. Despite the asymmetry of German orthography, no evidence was found for differences in the association of morphological awareness with spelling versus reading. Phonological processing shows stronger relations with literacy than morphological awareness does. This might indicate that in the transparent German orthography, alphabetic reading and spelling strategies are particularly relevant until the end of Grade 4. Yet, morphological fluency might start to unfold its relevance for reading and spelling near the end of fourth grade in German.
Highlights
IntroductionMorphological units (e.g. read + er) are the building blocks of meaning in both oral and written language
Morphological units are the building blocks of meaning in both oral and written language
The observed relationship between morphological awareness and literacy skills is in line with previous German research on primary school children (Görgen et al, 2021; Kargl & Landerl, 2018; Kargl et al, 2018; Klassert et al, 2018; Volkmer et al, 2019), but extends previous findings insofar as we showed that there is more than one facet of morphological awareness that can be tested reliably in German primary school children
Summary
Morphological units (e.g. read + er) are the building blocks of meaning in both oral and written language. To the best of our knowledge, to date six studies investigated relations between morphological awareness and literacy skills in German school children (Fink et al, 2012; Görgen et al, 2021; Kargl & Landerl, 2018; Kargl et al, 2018; Klassert et al, 2018; Volkmer et al, 2019). Morphological awareness might be less relevant for reading and spelling in transparent as compared to opaque orthographies, because when grapheme-to-phoneme and phoneme-to-grapheme mappings are regular, these might be sufficient for reading and spelling (Desrochers et al, 2018) Support for this assumption comes from Desrochers et al (2018) who investigated second-graders in three languages with descending degrees of orthographic transparency: Greek (most transparent), French and English (least transparent). Investigating the relationship between morphological awareness and literacy in German generates knowledge on how this relationship unfolds in a morphologically rich language with a relatively transparent, but asymmetric orthography
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