Contributions of Morphological Awareness Skills to Word-Level Reading and Spelling in First-Grade Children With and Without Speech Sound Disorder

Abstract

In this study, the authors compared the morphological awareness abilities of children with speech sound disorder (SSD) and children with typical speech skills and examined how morphological awareness ability predicted word-level reading and spelling performance above other known contributors to literacy development. Eighty-eight first-grade students--44 students with SSD and no known history of language deficiencies, and 44 students with typical speech and language skills--completed an assessment battery designed to measure speech sound production, morphological awareness, phonemic awareness, letter-name knowledge, receptive vocabulary, word-level reading, and spelling abilities. The children with SSD scored significantly lower than did their counterparts on the morphological awareness measures as well as on phonemic awareness, word-level reading, and spelling tasks. Regression analyses suggested that morphological awareness predicted significant unique variance on the spelling measure for both groups and on the word-level reading measure for the children with typical skills. These results suggest that children with SSD may present with a general linguistic awareness insufficiency, which puts them at risk for difficulties with literacy and literacy-related tasks.