Development Of Morphological Awareness Research Articles

Development of morphological awareness in Arabic: the role of morphological system and morphological distance

AbstractThis study is a cross-sectional developmental investigation of inflectional and derivational morphological awareness (MA) in Arabic diglossia. It examines the impact of the morphological distance between Spoken Arabic (SpA) and Standard Arabic (StA) on inflectional morphological awareness and derivational morphological awareness in a sample of 200 speakers of Palestinian Arabic (PA) in 2nd through 10th grade from mid-high and low SES backgrounds (N = 40 per grade, 20 per SES group). Eight MA tasks using morphological analogies and sentence completion were used that tested inflectional MA and derivational MA in SpA and in StA. Results showed a growth in inflectional and in derivational awareness across grades in both SES groups despite generally higher scores in the mid-high SES group. More interestingly, the results showed a consistent effect of morphological distance on morphological awareness in both morphological systems and in both SES groups, with MA for unique StA morphological structures lower than that for structures available in SpA. Moreover, the impact of morphological distance was more prominent in younger than in older children and in low than in mid-high SES. Finally, when morphological awareness in SpA was tested, inflectional awareness was higher than derivational awareness and showed a shorter cross-sectional developmental trajectory, reflecting universal linguistic and distributional properties of inflections. In contrast, when morphological awareness in StA was analyzed, inflectional awareness was lower than derivational awareness and showed a longer trajectory reflecting the wider linguistic distance between SpA and StA in inflectional morphology. The results underscore the significance of morphological system characteristics and morphological distance in understanding morphological awareness development in Arabic.

The development of morphological awareness and vocabulary: What influences what?

Abstract The awareness of words’ morphological structure has been thought to allow generalizing meaning to other, similarly constructed words. Conversely, a large vocabulary is thought to facilitate the recognition of words’ morphological regularities, thereby contributing to morphological awareness. For this reason, morphological awareness and vocabulary have been suggested to be reciprocally associated across development. We followed 242 (girls = 119) Norwegian preschoolers (Mage = 5.5 years) from preschool through Grade 2 and examined the cross-lagged relations between morphological awareness (inflections and derivations) and vocabulary (receptive and expressive). Our results confirm that the traditional cross-lagged panel model shows significant cross-lagged relations between morphological awareness and vocabulary, as previous studies have shown. However, no cross-lagged relations were found when we accounted for longitudinal measured stability through a cross-lagged panel model with lag-2 paths or unmeasured stability through the random intercept cross-lagged panel model. We found that approximately 50% of the variation in morphology and vocabulary was due to highly stable and invariant factors across grades. We discuss how the significant cross-lagged relations found in previous studies could have been due to their not accounting for the right type of stability when using longitudinal panel data.

The Impact of Verb Inflectional Distance on Morphological Awareness in Arabic Diglossia: Insights From a Longitudinal Study (Kindergarten to Grade 3).

The main aim of the current study was to examine the longitudinal impact of verb inflectional distance on morphological awareness among Arabic-speaking children from kindergarten (K) to third grade. The study also investigated the impact of testing children in two language varieties, Spoken Palestinian dialect (SPD) and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), on the development of morphological awareness. Sixty-two children were followed longitudinally at three time points: K, Grade 1 (G1), and Grade 3 (G3). Each child completed two parallel orally administered inflectional awareness pseudoverb tasks in the spoken and in the standard variety at each grade. The items were classified by form and function into two main distance levels: low-diglossic and high-diglossic, representing the closest and the farthest distance between SPD and MSA morphemes, respectively. The findings indicated that morphological awareness was more difficult for high-diglossic morphemes than for low-diglossic ones. Moreover, the findings point to different paths in the developmental trajectory of verb inflectional awareness by distance levels and language variety: In SPD, the difference in children's awareness between low-diglossic morphemes and high-diglossic morphemes decreased across grades and disappeared in G3, whereas, in MSA, this difference significantly increased from K to G1 and G3. These findings demonstrate the substantial impact of verb inflectional distance on morphological awareness development before and during the initial process of learning to read. Results are discussed within the context of linguistic distance and the development of metalinguistic processing skills with implications for assessment and intervention.

MORPHOLOGICAL ANALYSIS IN THE SERBIAN EFL LEARNING CONTEXT: INSIGHTS FROM THINK-ALOUD PROTOCOLS

Word-building or morphological analysis features prominently in the EFL/ESL teaching lit- erature as an effective vocabulary learning strategy (cf. Gairns & Redman 1986; Nation 2001; Nunan 1995; Oz 2014) which enables learners to decipher the meaning of new lexical items by breaking them down into constituent morphemes. While L1 speakers can rely on this strategy upon encountering unfamiliar words from an early age (Anglin 1993; Clark 2001), the use of word-building in the field of EFL acquisition appears to be an under-researched topic (cf. Ward & Chuenjundaeng 2009; Diaz Contreras 2018). Therefore, the aim of this paper is to contribute to the growing body of literature on the development of morphological awareness in non-native contexts by investigating the way Serbian B2-level learners (CEFR) attempt to figure out the meaning of morphologically complex words, namely derivatives comprising one, two or three derivational affixes. Think-aloud protocols revealed that the upper-intermediate Serbian L1 English L2 learners mostly employed morphological analysis with multimorphemic words (i.e. those containing two or three derivational affixes) while bimorphemic words were often regarded as unanalyzable lexical units. Also, the data collected indicated that the learners rarely drew analogies between unknown words and words of similar morphological structure. The ensuing pedagogical implications and possible teaching interventions will be discussed.

Morphological awareness development in primary school

RESUMO O artigo pretende caracterizar o nível de consciência morfológica no 1º ciclo e analisar a possível relação entre a consciência morfológica e a leitura e escrita. A amostra é constituída por 20 crianças, que frequentam o 2º (n=10) e o 4º ano de escolaridade (n=10). A recolha de dados foi realizada através da Grelha de Avaliação da Linguagem - Nível Escolar, da Bateria de Avaliação da Consciência Morfológica, da Bateria de Avaliação da Leitura em Português Europeu e de uma adaptação de provas de outros estudos. Conclui-se que o nível de consciência morfológica das crianças do 4º ano é estatisticamente superior às do 2º ano, nomeadamente na prova de analogia de palavras e de decisão morfossemântica-afixos, relativamente aos sufixos. Ainda assim foi possível verificar diferenças significativas nas tarefas de leitura de ambos os grupos. Verifica-se uma correlação entre algumas provas de consciência morfológica e a leitura e escrita.

Online Assessment of Morphological Awareness in Grades 2–4: Its Development and Relation to Reading Comprehension

The aims of the study are to construct an online instrument to assess different aspects of morphological awareness and to examine its development and its relation to reading comprehension in grades 2–4 in Hungarian children. Altogether, 4134 students were tested. The online test evaluated inflectional, derivational, and compound morphological skills with five subtests. The instrument proved to be reliable. CFA examinations revealed that the five subtests were empirically distinguishable dimensions. Inflectional, derivational, and compound morphology as the three main dimensions of morphological awareness were also empirically supported by our data. Morphological awareness skills improved significantly and developed in parallel with reading skills throughout grades 2–4. The increase in the development of morphological awareness from grade 2 to grade 3 tends to be faster than the growth between grade 3 and 4. Positive moderate correlations were found between morphological skills and reading comprehension and the relationships seem to be stable throughout the three grades. The most significant predictor of reading comprehension is the Affix Identification for Nonwords subtest. Our study showed that morphological awareness could be assessed efficiently through online media and drew attention to the importance of morphological awareness in the development of reading comprehension and linguistic intelligence.

The impact of a naturalistic intervention on preschool children’s morphological awareness development

This study evaluated the effectiveness of a morphological awareness intervention delivered by preschool teachers in the naturalistic setting of their classrooms. The participants were 162 Portuguese children, attending kindergarten who were allocated as groups to experimental and control conditions. The former group was the object of six-weeks morphological awareness intervention anchored on explicit discussions about the morphological structure of words appearing in selected storybooks. The control group received normal curriculum activities. Results showed strong to high effect sizes on morphological awareness post-test abilities of children in the experimental group related to identifying words of the same “family”, interpreting the meaning of stems and affixes in morphologically structured pseudowords and finding the base word in derived or inflected stimuli, after controlling for age, cognitive ability, vocabulary, pre-test phonological and morphological results. The relevance of developing tools that help preschool children to consciously manipulate morphemes as meaningful building blocks of words, in partnership with preschool teachers, is proposed.

Neural correlates of morphological processing and its development from pre-school to the first grade in children with and without familial risk for dyslexia

Previous studies have shown that the development of morphological awareness and reading skills are interlinked. However, most have focused on phonological awareness as a risk factor for dyslexia, although there is considerable diversity in the underlying causes of this reading difficulty. Specifically, the relationship between phonology, derivational morphology, and dyslexia in the Finnish language remains unclear. In the present study, we used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to measure the brain responses to correctly and incorrectly derived Finnish nouns in 34 first grade Finnish children (21 typically developing and 13 with familial risk for dyslexia). In addition, we compared longitudinally the morphological information processing of 27 children (16 typically developing and 11 at-risk for dyslexia) first at pre-school age and then at first grade age. The task consisted of 108 pairs of sentences, including a verb and its root with the derivational suffix/-jA/. Correctly and incorrectly derived forms were presented both as real words and pseudowords. The incorrectly derived nouns contained a morpho-phonological violation in the last vowel of the noun before the derivational suffix. The brain activation of the typically developing children in response to morphological information processing showed sensitivity to the morphologically correct vs. incorrect contrast only in the cases of the real words. Children at-risk for dyslexia showed sensitivity to the morphological information processing both for real words and pseudowords. However, no significant differences between the groups emerged either for the correct vs. incorrect morphological contrast or for the correctly and incorrectly derived forms separately. Interestingly, in our previous study, cluster-based permutation tests showed significant developmental behavioral and brain differences between the children at pre-school age and at first-grade age in the morphological information processing of real words and pseudowords. Our results indicate the important role of derivational morphology in the early phases of learning to read. • We examined morphological information processing in first grade children with and without risk for dyslexia with MEG. • The brain activity of the children without risk showed sensitivity to morphological information only for real nouns. • The children at-risk showed similar activity with typically developing children for real derived nouns and pseudo nouns. • No between group differences were found for the processing of the correct vs. incorrect nouns and pseudo nouns. • Significant developmental differences were found between ages, but no differences were found between groups.

Conocimiento de la morfología, conciencia morfológica y aprendizaje léxico. Objetivos “difusos” en la Enseñanza Secundaria

This paper is a critical study of the state of the didactics of morphology raised from the mismatch between the antigramaticalist didactic theory, -promulgated for decades and currently defended without consolidated fruits-, the educational curriculum in Secondary Education and the proposals developed in textbooks. It is defended the need for experimental research to assess the impact of knowledge of morphology on the development of morphological awareness in teenagers and to measure its effect on lexical enrichment. It is proposed a morphology didactic model that is based on the unitary theories of lexical processing (connectionism and associative models) and it is supported by the contributions of psycholinguistic research on the development of morphological awareness in ELE and in children with disorders of the language. The sequential phases in the development of morphological awareness, as well as the lexical activation models regulated by the types of formal and semantic connections and by the frequency factor, define the didactic levels of the model. This proposal should be made up of classroom practices that validate the inductive teaching of morphology aimed at developing lexical competence.

An online instrument assessing the relationship between morphological structure awareness and reading comprehension in Hungarian 2-4 graders

The significant contribution of morphological awareness to reading comprehension has been shown in studies with deep orthographies. The aim of the study was to develop an online instrument in Hungarian, an agglutinative language with a transparent orthography and a rich morphology, for assessing different aspects of morphological awareness and reading comprehension and to examine the development and relationship of the two constructs in grades 2-4. Participants were second (N=124), third (N=137), and fourth-grade students (N=97), age means were 8.7, 9.6 and 10.4 respectively. We found growth in the development of morphological awareness and reading comprehension in grades 2-4; however, the mean score in grade 4 did not significantly differ from the results in grade 3. Significant moderate correlations were found between morphological structure awareness and reading comprehension skills in all grades.

Developing morphological awareness across languages: translanguaging pedagogies in third language acquisition

ABSTRACTThis article focuses on the development of morphological awareness in English as a third language. It analyses how the activation of previous linguistic knowledge can influence morphological awareness. Participants were 104 primary school students who were learning English as a third language and were already fluent in two other languages, Basque and Spanish. Participants in the experimental group took part in a pedagogical intervention aiming at the development of morphological awareness by using translanguaging pedagogies. The aim of the intervention was to enable participants to use their linguistic repertoire across languages and benefit from their multilingual resources. Results indicate that participants in the experimental group obtained higher scores in morphological awareness than the control group from the same school. In addition, participants in the experimental group perceived that the use of translanguaging strategies was useful for their learning and also enjoyable as a teaching approach.

Profiling complex word usage in the speech of preschool children: Frequency patterns and transparency characteristics

This corpus-based study provides a baseline of complex word usage patterns in the spontaneous speech of English preschool children to ascertain the characteristics of their derivative vocabulary before literacy development affects language skills. Frequencies of suffixed derivatives produced by ( N = 243) children aged 2–5 and their caregivers were extracted for 58 suffix variants, yielding 558 types from the former and 1,364 from the latter. Between the youngest and oldest groups, 11 suffix categories increased significantly in type frequency, compared with 22 in the caregiver dataset. All derivative types were classified for transparency of meaning and simplicity of form on a five-point analysability scale. Around 59% of both the child and caregiver derivative vocabulary sets were classified as transparent regardless of age, suggesting that the potential analysability of the preschool child’s input remains surprisingly invariant over time. The study provides baseline data for future studies on the development of morphological awareness in English-speaking schoolchildren.

Morphological awareness predicts the growth rate of Chinese character reading

In this longitudinal study, we assessed 88 Hong Kong Chinese typically developing kindergarteners' Chinese character reading accuracy four times with 6-month intervals over 1.5years with the first testing point in the fall of the second year of kindergarten (K2), during which morphological awareness, phonological awareness, orthographic awareness, visual-spatial relationships, and nonverbal IQ were tested (Time 1). The latent growth curve modeling showed that reading development in Chinese of typically developing kindergarteners followed a cumulative linear trajectory, suggesting that children with higher initial reading ability develop reading ability at a faster rate. Additionally, morphological awareness at K2 positively and uniquely predicted a linear growth pattern of character reading between K2 and K3 over 1.5years, a period in which formal teaching and learning Chinese takes place in Hong Kong. Contributing to the literature, these findings highlighted the unique significance of morphological awareness in the growth rate of reading: Typically developing children with better early morphological awareness tend to have a higher initial point of reading ability and, more importantly, a faster growth rate, resulting in a wider discrepancy of developmental outcomes between low- and high- performers. The results suggest that greater attention should be focused on the development of morphological awareness in early readers, given its salient role in Chinese reading development.

The Development of Morphological Awareness in Young Bilinguals: Effects of Age and L1 Background.

Current understanding about the effect of first language (L1) background on morphological awareness (MA) development in those who are bilingual is largely limited to school-aged second-language learners. This study examined the development of MA in bilingual Mandarin-English (ManEngBi) and Spanish-English (SpaEngBi) children ages 4 to 7 years, whose L1 is predominated by compounding and derivation, respectively. We targeted specific word formation rules that develop within different developmental time frames. Forty-two ManEngBi, 30 SpaEngBi, and 27 English monolingual children divided into 4- to 5-year-old and 6- to 7-year-old age groups produced English words using compounding, the derivational agentive -er suffix, and the derivational characteristic -y suffix for both real and novel word roots. The characteristic -y suffix consistently elicited the poorest performance. This finding held true regardless of language group, age, or novelty of prompts. Both older SpaEngBi and English monolingual children outperformed older ManEngBi children in the characteristic -y suffix, whereas the three groups performed comparably on the other two rules at both age intervals. Error analysis further suggested influence of cross-linguistic features. L1 influence on English MA development is sensitive to the developmental time frame of word formation rules. Future studies on the development of MA in bilingual children should adopt a more fine-grained approach and include a wider age range.

The Role of Emergent Bilingualism in the Development of Morphological Awareness in Arabic and Hebrew.

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the role of dual language development and cross-linguistic influence on morphological awareness in young bilinguals' first language (L1) and second language (L2). We examined whether (a) the bilingual children (L1/L2 Arabic and L1/L2 Hebrew) precede their monolingual Hebrew- or Arabic-speaking peers in L1 and L2 morphological awareness, and (b) 1 Semitic language (Arabic) has cross-linguistic influence on another Semitic language (Hebrew) in morphological awareness. The study sample comprised 93 six-year-old children. The bilinguals had attended bilingual Hebrew-Arabic kindergartens for 1 academic year and were divided into 2 groups: home language Hebrew (L1) and home language Arabic (L1). These groups were compared to age-matched monolingual Hebrew speakers and monolingual Arabic speakers. We used nonwords similar in structure to familiar words in both target languages, representing 6 inflectional morphological categories. L1 Arabic and L1 Hebrew bilinguals performed significantly better than Arabic- and Hebrew-speaking monolinguals in the respective languages. Differences were not found between the bilingual groups. We found evidence of cross-linguistic transfer of morphological awareness from Arabic to Hebrew in 2 categories-bound possessives and dual number-probably because these categories are more salient in Palestinian Spoken Arabic than in Hebrew. We conclude that children with even an initial exposure to L2 reveal acceleration of sensitivity to word structure in both of their languages. We suggest that this is due to the fact that two Semitic languages, Arabic and Hebrew, share a common core of linguistic features, together with favorable contextual factors and instructional factors.

Development of Morphological Awareness in Young Chinese Readers: Comparing Poor Comprehenders and Good Comprehenders

ABSTRACTThe present study explored the relationship between reading comprehension skill and morphological awareness among young Chinese readers. The objectives were to investigate whether morphological awareness is a critical cognitive and linguistic ability to differentiate poor comprehenders and good comprehenders and to further scrutinize the interconnected relationship between reading comprehension skill and morphological awareness in both poor comprehenders and good comprehenders. Chinese 2nd-grade students (N = 275) in 3 different cities of China completed measures of reading comprehension skill and morphological awareness. Drawing on cluster analysis and multivariate analysis, the study found that young Chinese children with reading difficulties demonstrated weakness in all 3 facets of Chinese-specific morphological awareness (derivation, lexical compounding, and compounding structure). In addition, the study indicated that morphological awareness had a more substantial effect on reading comprehension skill in young poor comprehenders.

Development of morphological awareness through English songs: a case study

AbstractThe present study investigated the effects of English songs on morphological development— inflection, derivation, and compound words. Fifty Chinese EFL students were involved in this study. Two tests were administered to each learner immediately before and after the study. Results from the pre-tests revealed that all three groups with different vocabulary sizes brought some morphological knowledge to the study. The findings exhibited some evidence to support the fact that teaching through English songs can lead to the development of learner’s receptivity to morphology. However, exposure to the song was insufficient to develop productive knowledge in most of the learners. The study also revealed that groups with smaller vocabulary tended to achieve lower scores than groups with larger vocabulary. Based on these results and previous findings, pedagogical implications were made.

The development of morphological awareness in Chinese ESL students

Similar to English words, Chinese words can be viewed as the combination of root morphemes with either grammatical affixes, word-formation affixes, or other free morphemes. Therefore, it is logical to argue that Chinese speakers develop knowledge about inflectional and derivational morphemes similar to speakers of English language. To test this research hypothesis, 287 junior high school students (grades 7–9) were administered morphological awareness tests in both Chinese and English. Results from the Structural Equation Modeling showed that both inflectional and derivational awareness of Chinese are necessary (along with an awareness of compound words) to a construction of Chinese morphological awareness. The students' awareness of Chinese inflection and derivation is partially explained by their awareness of Chinese compound words, but there are still features that are uniquely inherent to Chinese inflection and derivation (in contrast to their counterparts in English). The overall transferring coefficient from Chinese MA to English MA in this study was .56, which suggests that higher levels of Chinese MA are associated with higher levels of English MA. Inductive reasoning can be as important as Chinese MA to the development of English MA, since it supports learners dealing with morphological features with which they are less familiar (English derivations) and that share many connections (such as English compounding).

Bilingualism and morphological awareness: a study with children from general education and Spanish-English dual language programs

Existing research on the impact of bilingualism on metalinguistic development has concentrated on the development of phonological awareness. The present study extended the scope of existing research by focusing on morphological awareness, an aspect of metalinguistic awareness that becomes increasingly important beyond the initial phase of literacy development. Participants included three groups of fourth-grader children from the same school with comparable SES and non-verbal IQ: (a) monolingual English-speaking children from a general education programme, (b) Spanish-speaking children from a Spanish–English dual-language programme and (c) English-speaking children from the same Spanish–English dual-language programme. Researcher-developed measures of vocabulary and morphological awareness were administered. Results suggested that bilingual education can have a positive impact on the development of morphological awareness through cross-language transfer as well as increased sensitivity to structural language features. The findings contribute to a growing body of research on how bilingual experience may shape children’s metalinguistic development.

Longitudinal Effects of Phonological Awareness Intervention on Morphological Awareness in Children With Speech Impairment

This study examined reading performance and morphological awareness development in 2 groups of children with speech impairment who had received differing types of intervention during their preschool years. The children were aged between 7;6 and 9;5 (years;months) at the time of the study. Group 1 (n = 8) had received preschool intervention to facilitate phonological awareness and letter knowledge in addition to improving speech production. Group 2 (n = 9) had received preschool intervention that focused solely on improving speech intelligibility. A third group of children with typical development (Group 3, n = 24) also participated in the study. Two reading tests were administered, one that assessed word recognition and another that assessed nonword decoding. Two tests of morphological awareness were also administered, one that tested the spelling of morphologically complex words and another that tested the oral generation of the base form of derived words. Children with a history of speech impairment who had received phonological awareness intervention (Group 1) performed significantly better on nonword decoding and on the spelling of morphologically complex words than did children with a history of speech impairment whose intervention focused on speech only (Group 2). The typically developing children (Group 3) were not significantly different from Group 1 on the spelling of morphologically complex words, and like Group 1, they outperformed Group 2 on this measure. However, Group 3 did not perform significantly better than Group 2 on nonword decoding, and both of these groups performed significantly more poorly than Group 1 on this measure. There were no group differences in the ability to orally generate base words. Children with a history of speech impairment who had received phonological awareness intervention and who became proficient readers demonstrated an ability to use morphological awareness in the spelling process that was similar to that of their peers without speech impairment. These findings highlight the potential long-term benefits associated with early phonological awareness intervention.