The Roles of the Speed and Accuracy of Morphological Processing in the Reading Comprehension of Spanish-Speaking Language Minority Learners

Abstract

This study examines morphological awareness performance in 27 low-SES Spanish-English bilingual students in Grades 4 through 7. Given that 1) reading fluency is a strong predictor of reading comprehension and 2) bilingual students with poor comprehension are often slow, albeit accurate readers, the primary goal of this study was to investigate the extent to which speed of morphological processing contributes to both reading fluency and reading comprehension in bilinguals. First, comparisons of accuracy and response times indicated that monolinguals significantly outperformed bilinguals on every measure. Further, hierarchical regression analyses showed that morphological processing speed makes significant, unique contributions to both text reading fluency and reading comprehension which are at least equal to those made by morphological processing accuracy. These results underscore the important role of morphological processing efficiency in reading comprehension and suggest that interventions targeting the speed of morphological processing may improve reading comprehension skills for bilingual students.