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Morphological awareness: Just “more phonological”? The roles of morphological and phonological awareness in reading development

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 May 2004

S. HÉLÈNE DEACON  and
JOHN R. KIRBY
S. HÉLÈNE DEACON
Affiliation:
Oxford University
JOHN R. KIRBY
Affiliation:
Queen's University at Kingston
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Abstract

Given the morphophonemic nature of the English orthography, surprisingly few studies have examined the roles of morphological and phonological awareness in reading. This 4-year longitudinal study (Grades 2–5) compared these two factors in three aspects of reading development: pseudoword reading, reading comprehension, and single word reading. Morphological awareness contributed significantly to pseudoword reading and reading comprehension, after controlling prior measures of reading ability, verbal and nonverbal intelligence, and phonological awareness. This contribution was comparable to that of phonological awareness and remained 3 years after morphological awareness was assessed. In contrast, morphological awareness rarely contributed significantly to single word reading. We argue that these results provide evidence that morphological awareness has a wide-ranging role in reading development, one that extends beyond phonological awareness.

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Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 25 , Issue 2 , April 2004 , pp. 223 - 238
Copyright
© 2004 Cambridge University Press

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