Abstract
Children from low-SES families are known to show delays in aspects of language development which underpin reading acquisition such as vocabulary and listening comprehension. Research on the development of morphological skills in this group is scarce, and no studies exist in French. The present study investigated the involvement of morphological knowledge in the very early stages of reading acquisition (decoding), before reading comprehension can be reliably assessed. We assessed listening comprehension, receptive vocabulary, phoneme awareness, morphological awareness as well as decoding, word reading and non-verbal IQ in 703 French first-graders from low-SES families after 3 months of formal schooling (November). Awareness of derivational morphology was assessed using three oral tasks: Relationship Judgment (e.g., do these words belong to the same family or not? heat-heater … ham-hammer); Lexical Sentence Completion [e.g., Someone who runs is a …? (runner)]; and Non-lexical Sentence Completion [e.g., Someone who lums is a…? (lummer)]. The tasks differ on implicit/explicit demands and also tap different kinds of morphological knowledge. The Judgement task measures the phonological and semantic properties of the morphological relationship and the Sentence Completion tasks measure knowledge of morphological production rules. Data were processed using a graphical modeling approach which offers key information about how skills known to be involved in learning to read are organized in memory. This modeling approach was therefore useful in revealing a potential network which expresses the conditional dependence structure between skills, after which recursive structural equation modeling was applied to test specific hypotheses. Six main conclusions can be drawn from these analyses about low SES reading acquisition: (1) listening comprehension is at the heart of the reading acquisition process; (2) word reading depends directly on phonemic awareness and indirectly on listening comprehension; (3) decoding depends on word reading; (4) Morphological awareness and vocabulary have an indirect influence on word reading via both listening comprehension and phoneme awareness; (5) the components of morphological awareness assessed by our tasks have independent relationships with listening comprehension; and (6) neither phonemic nor morphological awareness influence vocabulary directly. The implications of these results with regard to early reading acquisition among low SES groups are discussed.
Highlights
An association between reading achievement and socioeconomic status (SES) has been reported consistently across decades of research (Duncan and Seymour, 2000; O’Connor et al, 2009; Cabell et al, 2013; Hemmerechts et al, 2017)
The present study investigated the very early stages of reading acquisition among low SES children with the aim of examining how morphological knowledge relates to other oral language components such as listening comprehension, vocabulary, and phonemic awareness which are known to impact reading development
The goal of this study was to investigate the involvement of morphological knowledge in the very early stages of reading acquisition, before reading comprehension can be assessed, among a very large sample of 703 French first-graders from low SES families
Summary
An association between reading achievement and socioeconomic status (SES) has been reported consistently across decades of research (Duncan and Seymour, 2000; O’Connor et al, 2009; Cabell et al, 2013; Hemmerechts et al, 2017). Children from low-SES families are known to show delays in aspects of language development which underpin reading acquisition such as vocabulary and listening comprehension (Scarborough, 2001; Muter et al, 2004), and lower levels of skill in oral language production and comprehension, extending from early childhood into high school and beyond (Hoff, 2006; Huttenlocher et al, 2010; Fernald et al, 2013). Standardized language tests reveal discrepancies between higher and lower SES children when measures of grammatical development and complex syntax comprehension are included (Dollaghan et al, 1999; Huttenlocher et al, 2002). The interaction between oral language and reading acquisition has recently been receiving much attention among children from low SES families (Tse and Nicholson, 2014). Few studies have focused on how morphological awareness develops in low SES groups or on the relationship between morphological awareness and reading acquisition (Apel and Diehm, 2014); with French-speaking children, there have been no studies conducted on these issues
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