Unexpected poor comprehenders: An investigation of multiple aspects of morphological awareness

Abstract

Poor comprehenders have age‐appropriate word reading skills but struggle with understanding what they read. The purpose of this study was to investigate how poor comprehenders perform on multiple aspects of morphological awareness, a skill implicated in reading comprehension. In keeping with current research and theory, we look at three aspects of morphological awareness: morphological structure awareness, morphological analysis and morphological decoding. Using a regression‐based approach, we identified 64 poor and average comprehenders out of a large sample of children in grade 3. Our results show that poor comprehenders and average comprehenders performed remarkably similar on morphological structure awareness, analysis, and decoding. Poor comprehenders performed more poorly than average comprehenders only on word analogy, a specific measure of morphological awareness. These results identify an area with which poor comprehenders are likely to struggle, while simultaneously providing evidence for areas of relative strength within this population.