Abstract
The purpose of this longitudinal study was to examine the role of three morphological awareness (MA) skills (inflection, derivation, and compounding) in word reading fluency and reading comprehension in a relatively transparent orthography (Greek). Two hundred and fifteen (104 girls; Mage = 67.40 months, at kindergarten) Greek children were followed from kindergarten (K) to grade 2 (G2). In K and grade 1 (G1), they were tested on measures of MA (two inflectional, two derivational, and three compounding), letter knowledge, phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming (RAN), and general cognitive ability (vocabulary and non-verbal IQ). At the end of G1 and G2, they were also tested on word reading fluency and reading comprehension. The results of hierarchical regression analyses showed that the inflectional and derivational aspects of MA in K as well as all aspects of MA in G1 accounted for 2–5% of unique variance in reading comprehension. None of the MA skills predicted word reading fluency, after controlling for the effects of vocabulary and RAN. These findings suggest that the MA skills, even when assessed as early as in kindergarten, play a significant role in reading comprehension development.
Highlights
The purpose of this study was to examine the role of three morphological awareness (MA) skills in reading fluency and comprehension in a sample of Greek children followed from kindergarten to grade 2
The purpose of the present study was to examine the role of three MA skills in reading fluency and reading comprehension in a sample of Greek children followed from kindergarten to grade 2
The measures that made up each MA skill correlated higher than 0.50 with each other
Summary
Several studies have shown that morphological awareness (MA) (the awareness of morphemic structures of words and the ability to reflect on them) is an important predictor of reading ability (e.g., Carlisle, 2003; Reichle and Perfetti, 2003; Deacon and Kirby, 2004; McCutchen et al, 2009; Tibi and Kirby, 2017; see Ruan et al, 2017, for a meta-analysis) surviving the statistical control of other key predictors of reading ability such as vocabulary, phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming (RAN), and orthographic knowledge (e.g., McBride-Chang et al, 2005; Roman et al, 2009; Deacon, 2012; Desrochers et al, 2017).previous studies examining the relationship of MA with reading ability have some important limitations. Most of the studies reporting a connection between MA and reading ability have administered tasks based either on the explicitness of the morphological information (analogy, judgment, production) (e.g., Carlisle, 1995; Roman et al, 2009) or the representational level of morphological processes (inflection, derivation, and compounding) (e.g., Casalis and Louis-Alexandre, 2000; Vaknin-Nusbaum et al, 2016) Assessing both the representational level of morphological processes and the explicitness of morphological information (e.g., examining the inflectional awareness by an analogy and a production task) can give us clearer evidence about the distinct roles of morphological processes in reading development. The purpose of this study was to examine the role of three MA skills (inflectional, derivational, and compounding) in reading fluency and comprehension in a sample of Greek children followed from kindergarten to grade 2
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