Abstract
In the current study we examined the contribution of morphological awareness to reading competence in a group of Italian L1 and Arabic-Italian early L2 children, i.e., exposed to Italian before 3 years of age. Children from first to fifth grade (age range: 6 to 11 years old) were tested on a range of morphological awareness and lexical tasks. Reading ability was tested through standardized tests of reading fluency and comprehension. Results showed that L1 children outperformed L2 on every measure of morphological awareness, as well as on reading tests. Regression analyses revealed that morphological awareness contributed to a different extent to reading ability across groups. Accuracy in the morphological awareness tasks was a significant predictor of word (and non-word) reading fluency in L1 and L2 first and second graders, while only in L1 third to fifth graders, response times and accuracy to a morphological awareness task explained a unique amount of variance in reading comprehension. Our results highlight the critical role of morphological processing in reading efficiency and suggest that a training inspired by morphological awareness may improve reading skills also in bilingual students.
Highlights
In recent years, research has often investigated the linguistic underpinnings of reading development, highlighting the role of phonological skills and vocabulary as significant predictors of literacy achievement (Gathercole and Baddeley, 1989, 1993; Baddeley et al, 1998)
We tested whether a reading variable was significantly predicted by the performance to morphological awareness tasks and to the lexical task
We explored the extent to which morphological awareness affects reading fluency and comprehension in monolingual (L1 Italian) and bilingual (Arabic-Italian) children coming from low SES background
Summary
Research has often investigated the linguistic underpinnings of reading development, highlighting the role of phonological skills and vocabulary as significant predictors of literacy achievement (Gathercole and Baddeley, 1989, 1993; Baddeley et al, 1998). From this standpoint, adequate phonological skills are a prerequisite for the development of optimal phonological representations of words in the mental lexicon (Fowler, 1991), and, as a consequence, of reading development (e.g., Baddeley et al, 1998). We aimed at gaining a clearer understanding of the relationship between morphological awareness and reading achievement
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