Abstract
Different language skills are considered fundamental for successful reading and spelling acquisition. Extensive evidence has highlighted the central role of phonological awareness in early literacy experiences. However, many orthographic systems also require the contribution of morphological awareness. The goal of this study was to examine the morphological and phonological awareness skills of preschool children as longitudinal predictors of reading and spelling ability by the end of first grade, controlling for the effects of receptive and expressive vocabulary skills. At Time 1 preschool children from kindergartens in the Greek regions of Attika, Crete, Macedonia, and Thessaly were assessed on tasks tapping receptive and expressive vocabulary, phonological awareness (syllable and phoneme), and morphological awareness (inflectional and derivational). Tasks were administered through an Android application for mobile devices (tablets) featuring automatic application of ceiling rules. At Time 2 one year later the same children attending first grade were assessed on measures of word and pseudoword reading, text reading fluency, text reading comprehension, and spelling. Complete data from 104 children are available. Hierarchical linear regression and commonality analyses were conducted for each outcome variable. Reading accuracy for both words and pseudowords was predicted not only by phonological awareness, as expected, but also by morphological awareness, suggesting that understanding the functional role of word parts supports the developing phonology–orthography mappings. However, only phonological awareness predicted text reading fluency at this age. Longitudinal prediction of reading comprehension by both receptive vocabulary and morphological awareness was already evident at this age, as expected. Finally, spelling was predicted by preschool phonological awareness, as expected, as well as by morphological awareness, the contribution of which is expected to increase due to the spelling demands of Greek inflectional and derivational suffixes introduced at later grades.
Highlights
Reading and spelling are considerable cognitive undertakings that require the integration of written and spoken language
The unique contribution of morphological awareness was sizeable (9–14% of variance, depending on outcome measure) and was accompanied by additional, comparable proportions of variance (9–15%) shared with the other measures, bringing up the total longitudinal predicted variance from morphological awareness to more than 20% of reading outcomes. In this longitudinal study we have investigated the prediction of reading and spelling outcomes near the end of Grade 1 by language and metalinguistic skills assessed in preschool 14 months earlier
Our results are consistent with the findings of Casalis and Louis-Alexandre (2000), who studied early reading performance longitudinally predicted by preschool phonological and morphological awareness in French, and found both a strong correlation between phonological and morphological awareness at these ages as well as longitudinal relationships between both of them and early reading
Summary
Reading and spelling are considerable cognitive undertakings that require the integration of written and spoken language. An overwhelming body of research evidence suggests that children’s phonological awareness, which requires conscious reflection upon and explicit manipulation of the constituent speech sounds of language, is a necessary requirement for the acquisition of the alphabetic principle (Byrne, 1996) and a key skill for mastering decoding (National Reading Panel, 2000; Lonigan et al, 2009) and spelling across orthographies (Cataldo and Ellis, 1988; Ellis and Cataldo, 1990; Byrne and Fielding-Barnsley, 1991, 1993; Porpodas, 1999; Aidinis and Nunes, 2001; Caravolas et al, 2001, 2005; Cardoso-Martins and Pennington, 2004; Furnes and Samuelsson, 2010). The present study aimed to examine the predictive value of preschool morphological and phonological awareness in learning to read and spell.
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