Morphological Awareness Tasks Research Articles

Morphological awareness uniquely predicts young children's Chinese character recognition.

Two unique measures of morphological awareness, along with other reading-related tasks, were orally administered to 100 kindergarten and 100 2nd-grade Hong Kong Chinese children. These morphological awareness tasks were developed on the basis of 2 special properties of Chinese: (a) the relatively large number of homophones requires speakers to distinguish unique meanings in syllables with identical sounds, and (b) complex vocabulary words are often built from 2 or more previously learned morphemes. Both tasks of morphological awareness predicted unique variance in Chinese character recognition in these children, after controlling for age, phonological awareness, speeded naming, speed of processing, and vocabulary. Developmentally, both tasks of morphological awareness improved with age. Results demonstrate that morphological awareness is uniquely important for early Chinese character recognition.

Phonological and morphological awareness in first graders

ABSTRACTPhonological awareness is thought to be related to children's success in learning to read because it indicates an awareness of the internal structure of words. Morphological awareness, which has been found to be related to reading achievement for older students, may offer a more comprehensive measure of linguistic sensitivity because it entails not only phonological awareness, but also other aspects of linguistic knowledge. The research study reported herein was designed to investigate the extent to which phonological awareness contributes to the morphological awareness of first graders and to determine the extent to which phonological and morphological awareness account for variance in word reading. Two tasks of morphological awareness were used, one assessing judgments of morphological relations and the other assessing the production of inflected and derived forms.