Syntactic Awareness Skills in Children with Dyslexia: The Contributions of Phonological Awareness and Morphological Awareness.

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.

Measures of phonological and morphological awareness of Chinese were administered to 94 third-grade students of Chinese in Taiwan to evaluate their relative contributions to current and prospective prediction of early reading in Chinese L1 and English L2. Phonological awareness made a significant unique contribution to Chinese character reading concurrently at grade 3 and subsequently at grade 5 beyond controls and morphological awareness. Morphological awareness contributed no additional unique variance to character reading at grade 3 beyond phonological awareness, but became significant at grade 5 beyond phonological awareness and the autoregressor. Phonological and morphological awareness of Chinese also predicted unique variance in English word reading at grades 3 and 5, though only phonological awareness remained significant at grade 5 beyond the autoregressor. These results suggest that phonological and morphological awareness differs in their relative importance at different stages of learning to read different scripts among children in Taiwan, but their effects in reading are persistent longitudinally and pervasive cross-linguistically.

This research aimed to explore the relation between syntactic awareness and writing composition in 129 Hong Kong Chinese children. These children were from a ten-year longitudinal project. At each year, a number of measures were administered. The 129 children's data of nonverbal reasoning at age 4, phonological awareness, morphological awareness, vocabulary knowledge at age 8, reading comprehension at age 12 and syntactic awareness and writing composition skills at ages 11 and 12 were included in this study. Syntactic awareness was longitudinally and uniquely predictive of Chinese children's writing composition, and children's performance in early writing composition was uniquely associated with their later syntactic skills, even when controlling for the contributions from age, nonverbal and verbal abilities, phonological awareness, and morphological awareness. The relationship between syntactic awareness and writing composition was mediated by children's performance in reading comprehension. These findings may suggest a reciprocal relation between syntactic awareness and writing composition, and this association may vary with ability in reading comprehension in Chinese children.

The present study examined the roles of phonological and morphological awareness in Korean elementary school students’ vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension. A total of 98 Korean sixth-grade students participated in this study and took phonological awareness (i.e., rhyme and phoneme awareness), morphological awareness (i.e., compounding, inflectional, and derivational awareness), vocabulary knowledge, and reading comprehension tests. The results revealed that phonological and morphological awareness predicted 10% and 4% of the total variance in vocabulary knowledge, respectively, and, 11.4% and 25% of the total variance in reading comprehension after controlling for vocabulary knowledge. Among the three types of morphological awareness, inflectional awareness was the strongest predictor explaining the variances in vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension, whereas derivational awareness did not explain any variance in either outcome. Such findings indicate that, for the Korean sixth-graders, the role of phonological and morphological awareness in their English vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension overlap, but morphological awareness benefits their text-level comprehension more than their phonological awareness. Several pedagogical implications are also discussed.

Purpose: The main goal of this study was to examine whether the morphological structure of a child’sfirstlanguagedeterminedthestrengthofassociationbetweenmorphologicalawarenessand readingandspellingskillsinEnglish,theirsecondlanguage.Methods:Thesampleconsistedof888 GradesixstudentswhohadEnglishastheirfirstlanguageand244EnglishLanguageLearners(ELLs) who came from seven home language backgrounds: Chinese, Filipino, Germanic, Korean, Persian, Romance, and Slavic. Participants were given a series of standardized tests for word reading, reading comprehension, and spelling, and experimental measures of morphological, phonological, and syntactic awareness, as well as reading fluency and reading comprehension. Results: The results revealed that children in the ELL groups differed from the English monolingual group mostly on the oral language tasks, but their reading skills were high and equivalent to those of the monolingual group. Moreover, it was confirmed that morphological awareness is important for all aspects of reading and spelling, and its influence is independent of that of phonological awareness and syntactic awareness. Conclusion: The associations between morphological awareness and reading and spelling in a second language seem to be influenced by the morphological structure of the home language, such that the association was stronger for children whose home languages were morphologically transparent. Keywords: cross-linguistic, ELL, morphological awareness, reading, spelling

A reciprocal relationship between syntactic awareness and reading comprehension

This study examined variations in reading acquisition according to socioeconomic background. Word reading speed and accuracy, phonological awareness, and morphological awareness were assessed among 199 native Hebrew-speaking children from high and low SES in the second, fourth, and sixth grades. The study further investigated the possible mediating role of phonological and morphological awareness in predicting reading of vowelized vs. unvowelized Hebrew scripts. Results indicated that despite an overall pattern of development in word reading found for both high SES and low SES children, the development was slower among children of low SES. A discrepancy emerged between children of high and low SES regarding levels of phonological and morphological awareness; this discrepancy increased with grade. Moreover, differences in reading ability showed a comparatively small increase with grade when controlling for phonological and morphological awareness, indicating that SES affected reading indirectly through its impact on the phonological and morphological precursors to reading. Thus, the present findings asserted that children from low SES families enter school with weak phonological and morphological awareness skills, which have cascading consequences on the development of reading skills in general, and the speed of reading scripts in particular.

ABSTRACTBackgroundPhonological awareness is an important skill for literacy development. However, limited research has been conducted on tonal languages or non‐alphabetic orthographies, including Thai. Understanding the development of phonological awareness in Thai‐speaking children is important for identifying risk factors for dyslexia and for understanding the role of phonological awareness in Thai‐speaking children with communication impairments.AimsThis scoping review synthesised empirical studies on phonological awareness in Thai‐speaking children. We aimed to describe the tasks and experiments typically used in studies, outline the performance of phonological awareness in typically developing and non‐typically developing children across preschool to school age, and highlight the importance of phonological awareness skills to literacy development.MethodsPeer‐reviewed papers were retrieved from eight electronic databases, supplemented by manual reference and website searches for relevant articles on phonological awareness in Thai‐speaking children. The inclusion criteria for eligible studies were articles published in English since 2000 investigating phonological awareness skills in preschool‐ and school‐aged Thai‐speaking children (2;0–12;0 years).Main ContributionsFourteen full‐text articles were screened, and 13 met the inclusion criteria. Papers focused on the relationship between phonological awareness and reading skills (n = 5), phonological awareness skills in children at risk of learning disabilities or dyslexia (n = 5), and lexical tone awareness (n = 2). The findings showed that phonological awareness was important for reading abilities across all reported ages, while lexical tone awareness significantly impacted reading abilities only when children were in kindergarten (3;0–6;0 years). Phonological awareness tests were also used as a tool for identifying children at risk of learning disabilities or dyslexia. Initial phoneme identification was the most commonly used phonological awareness task across all 13 studies.ConclusionsPhonological awareness is essential for reading skills and identifying children at risk of learning disabilities or dyslexia. Future research is needed to investigate the acquisition of phonological awareness in Thai‐speaking children and to examine the phonological awareness skills of children with communication impairments, such as speech sound disorders.WHAT THIS PAPER ADDSWhat is already known on this subjectPhonological awareness is essential for the development of literacy skills across many languages and orthographies. Phonological awareness acquisition in English and other similar languages follows a predictable pattern of development from larger units, such as syllable identification, to smaller units, such as phoneme identification. Children with speech sound disorders, or those at risk of dyslexia, may have problems with these skills, leading to literacy problems or speech sound disorders that are slow to resolve.What this paper adds to the existing knowledgeThis scoping review revealed that phonological awareness is an important element in developing reading skills across ages in Thai‐speaking children. Moreover, lexical tone awareness, which is important in Thai, influenced reading skills only at the kindergarten level, while the effect dissipated in older age groups. A variety of phonological and tone awareness tasks were applied to identify children at risk of learning disabilities or dyslexia in the studies included in the review.What are the practical and clinical implications of this work?The findings of this scoping review underscore the importance of phonological awareness in reading skills for Thai‐speaking children. There is currently no single Thai phonological awareness assessment that covers all aspects of phonological and tone awareness for Thai speakers. Additional research is needed on phonological awareness in children with speech, language, and communication needs, such as children with speech sound disorders or developmental language disorder.

This study examined the within- and cross-language metalinguistic contribution of three components of metalinguistic awareness (i.e., phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and syntactic awareness) to reading comprehension in monolingual Chinese-speaking children from Mainland China (n= 190) and English–Chinese bilingual children from Singapore (n= 390). Moreover, the effect of home language use on the relationship between metalinguistic awareness and reading performance was investigated. For monolingual children, hierarchical regression analyses revealed that after partialing out the effects of age, nonverbal intelligence, and oral vocabulary, syntactic awareness uniquely predicted 7%–13% of the variance in reading comprehension measures, whereas this relationship was not observed between morphological awareness and reading comprehension. For the bilingual children, within-language regression analyses revealed that English/Chinese morphological awareness and syntactic awareness both contributed significantly to English/Chinese reading measures over and above vocabulary and phonological awareness. Cross-linguistically, structure equation modeling results demonstrated that the bilingual children’s English and Chinese metalinguistic awareness were closely related and jointly supported reading comprehension in both languages, thus lending support to Koda’s transfer facilitation model. Furthermore, home language use was found to contribute to the bilingual children’s reading proficiency via its impact on metalinguistic awareness. The paper concludes with a discussion of the policy and pedagogical implications that can be drawn from these findings.

The awareness of the formal structure of language has been widely studied in the literature but less in a bilingualism context. Even less with second-language learners (SLL) who are acquiring their second language (L2) and are not considered as bilinguals. This study aimed at providing an investigation of young SLL's skills in phonological, morphological and syntactic awareness. Ninety-five French first graders participated in our study. Children were divided into two groups: monolinguals versus SLL of German (i.e., L1 = French, L2 = German). Both groups completed two phonological tasks (i.e., phonological categorization and deletion). They also completed four morphological tasks evaluating their morphological awareness on two distinct aspects (i.e., affixes and compounds). Finally, they were evaluated on a syntactic awareness task. The main findings highlighted a bilingual superiority for compounds morphological and syntactic awareness but not for affixes morphological and phonological awareness. The second-language learning advantage was observed on dimensions distinguishing the two languages (i.e., compounds morphology and syntax) but not on shared affixes morphological and phonological dimensions. Thus, results are discussed in light of languages' characteristics and bilingualism proficiency.

ABSTRACTThis study examines the contribution of early phonological processing (PP) and language skills on later phonological awareness (PA) and morphological awareness (MA), as well as the links among PA, MA, and reading. Children 4–6 years of age with poor PP at the start of school showed weaker PA and MA 3 years later (age 7–9), regardless of their language skills. PA and phonological and morphological strategies predict reading accuracy, whereas MA predicts reading comprehension. Our findings suggest that children with poor early PP are more at risk of developing deficits in MA and PA than children with poor language. They also suggest that there is a direct link between PA and reading accuracy and between MA and reading comprehension that cannot be accounted for by strategy use at the word level.

ABSTRACTThis study examines the link between phonological and morphological awareness and reading comprehension among special-education children who attend self-contained special education classes in regular Arab elementary schools.The three hypotheses were: First, the higher the level of phonological awareness in Arabic among special education learners, the better their reading comprehension level. Similarly, the higher the level of morphological awareness in Arabic among special education learners, the better their reading comprehension level. Third, it is possible to point to a joint effect of a child’s phonological awareness and morphological awareness on reading comprehension abilities. This study’s findings confirmed all three hypotheses and can subsequently be applied to understanding the processes underlying phonological and morphological awareness. This may be instrumental in discovering methods for promoting literacy and reading comprehension in special education learners. This study may also contribute to development of teacher training programmes that focus on effective methods for raising phonological and morphological awareness, ultimately resulting in improved reading comprehension in special education learners.

The paper reported an exploratory study that tested (a) the relationship between phonological and morphological awareness in English (L1)–Arabic (L2) bilingual children in Canada (N = 43), and (b) the relevance of these skills to word and pseudoword reading accuracy, and to complex word reading fluency. The results showed a significant correlation between phonological awareness in English and in Arabic. However, morphological awareness in the two languages was not correlated. Phonological awareness predicted reading cross-linguistically, but only Arabic morphological awareness predicted word reading in English. Moreover, while both phonological and morphological awareness in English predicted independent unique variance in English word reading, only phonological awareness in Arabic predicted Arabic word reading. Complex-word reading fluency was predicted by morphological awareness within both languages. Similarly, in both languages, phonological awareness was the single factor predicting pseudoword decoding accuracy. The results are discussed in terms of cross-linguistic differences between English and Arabic in orthographic depth and in morphological structure and transparency.

Although relations between morphological awareness, phonological awareness, and vocabulary have been widely observed, questions remain about their precise associations. The purpose of the present study was to explore the relations of morphological awareness with two highly related linguistic skills (phonological awareness and vocabulary) in a transparent orthographywith rich morphology. The study sample consisted of 121 (58 males, Mean age = 93.94months, SD = 3.32) 2nd grade Greek-speaking children. Confirmatory factor analysis revealed that the three-factor model provided the best fit to thedata, indicating that although morphological awareness, phonological awareness, and vocabulary are highly correlated, they represent distinct linguistic constructs. In addition, hierarchical regression analysis was used to examine the bidirectional effects between the three linguistic skills. Results revealed that both phonological awareness and vocabulary significantly contributed to morphological awareness, with phonological awareness having a stronger effect. Conversely, morphological awareness significantly affected both phonological awareness and vocabulary. The effect size from phonological awareness and vocabulary to morphological awareness was similar to the effect size reported from morphological awareness to phonological awareness and vocabulary. These results suggestthat morphological awareness is highly associated with phonological awareness and vocabulary, being though a distinct skill. In addition, it seems that these linguistic skills have bidirectional effects with each other in first grades.

This study examined whether syntactic awareness was related to reading comprehension difficulties in either first language (L1) Chinese or second language (L2) English, or both, among Hong Kong Chinese-English bilingual children. Parallel L1 and L2 metalinguistic and reading measures, including syntactic word-order, morphological awareness, phonological awareness, vocabulary, word reading, reading comprehension, and cognitive measures of nonverbal intelligence and working memory, were administered to 224 fourth-graders. Five groups of comprehenders were identified using a regression approach: (1) 12 poor in Chinese-only (PC), (2) 18 poor in English-only (PE), (3) six poor in both Chinese and English (PB), (4) 14 average in both Chinese and English (AB), and (5) seven good in both (GB). The results of multivariate analyses of covariance showed that (1) the PB group performed worse than the AB and GB groups in both L1 Chinese and L2 English syntactic awareness; (2) the PC and PE groups performed worse than the AB and GB groups in Chinese syntactic awareness; (3) the PE group had lower performance than the PC, AB, and GB groups in English syntactic awareness; and (4) no significant group difference was found in L2 morphological awareness or vocabulary across both languages. By suggesting that weakness insyntactic awareness can serve asa universal indicator for identifying poor comprehenders in either or both L1Chinese and L2English among Hong Kong Chinese-Englishbilingual children, these findings demonstrate the fundamental role of syntacticawareness in bilingual reading comprehension.