Morphological Awareness and Prosodic Sensitivity in the Development of Advanced Reading Skills

Abstract

That language abilities and literacy abilities are intrinsically linked is a well-founded conclusion, driven by the past three decades of research examining reading development. Although the effects of phonological awareness (PA) - the conscious ability to manipulate the sound structure of one’s native language - in developing successful early reading skills are well-known, its predictive abilities attenuate rapidly as development progresses. Accordingly, more recent research has also examined the influence that other linguistic skills present. The present study examines how morphological awareness (MA) - the conscious understanding of how words can be created by using different morphemes, the meaningful units of language - and prosodic sensitivity (PS) - the perception of how stress patterns in English can change the meaning of a word or phrase - affect the reading skills of children in grades 3, 5, and 7 from the Kingston area. Each child was given three batteries of tests, comprised to measure the child’s abilities in reading, MA, PS, PA, language comprehension, memory, general intelligence, and other skills. Our results show that both morphological awareness and prosodic sensitivity are significant predictors of reading skills, above and beyond the significance of phonological awareness, and after controlling for other skills such as memory and intelligence. Such findings are critical to improving our understanding of how reading ability develops in children and how we as researchers may be of aid to improving the skills of children struggling to learn literacy skills.