S. Hélène Deacon

The Effects of Morphological Instruction on Literacy Skills A Systematic Review of the Literature

The authors reviewed all peer-reviewed studies with participants from preschool to Grade 8 for this meta-analysis of morphological interventions. They identified 22 applicable studies. Instructional effects (Cohen’s d) were averaged by linguistic outcome categories (morphological sublexical, nonmorphological sublexical, lexical, and supralexical) and comparison group (experimental group vs. control or experimental group vs. alternative training). The authors investigated the effects of morphological instruction (a) on reading, spelling, vocabulary, and morphological skills, (b) for less able readers versus undifferentiated samples, (c) for younger versus older students, and (d) in combination with instruction of other literacy skills or in isolation. Results indicate that (a) morphological instruction benefits learners, (b) it brings particular benefits for less able readers, (c) it is no less effective for younger students, and (d) it is more effective when combined with other aspects of literacy instruction. Implications of these findings are discussed in light of current educational practice and theory.

Crossover: The Role of Morphological Awareness in French Immersion Children's Reading

Achieving biliteracy is a remarkable accomplishment, and it is important to understand the range of factors that permit its successful realization. The authors investigated a factor known to affect reading in monolingual children that has received little attention in the second-language literature: morphological awareness. The researchers tracked the relationships between performance on past tense analogy tasks (the measure of morphological awareness) and reading of English and French in a group of 58 French immersion children across Grades 1-3. Early measures of English morphological awareness were significantly related to both English and French reading, after controlling for several variables. In contrast, early measures of French morphological awareness were significantly related to French reading only. Later measures of morphological awareness in French were significantly related to English and French reading. These relationships persisted even after controlling for several variables. Results of this study suggest that morphological awareness can be applied to reading across orthographies and that this relationship changes as children build their language and literacy skills. These findings are discussed in light of current theories of second-language reading acquisition.

Morphological and Syntactic Awareness in Poor Comprehenders Another Piece of the Puzzle

Poor comprehenders have intact word-reading skills but struggle specifically with understanding what they read. We investigated whether two metalinguistic skills, morphological and syntactic awareness, are specifically related to poor reading comprehension by including separate and combined measures of each. We identified poor comprehenders (n = 15) and average comprehenders (n = 15) in Grade 4 who were matched on word-reading accuracy and speed, vocabulary, nonverbal cognitive ability, and age. The two groups performed comparably on a morphological awareness task that involved both morphological and syntactic cues. However, poor comprehenders performed less well than average comprehenders on a derivational word analogy task in which there was no additional syntactic information, thus tapping only morphological awareness, and also less well on a syntactic awareness task, in which there were no morphological manipulations. Our task and participant-selection process ruled out key nonmetalinguistic sources of influence on these tasks. These findings suggest that the relationships among reading comprehension, morphological awareness, and syntactic awareness depend on the tasks used to measure the latter two. Future research needs to identify precisely in which ways these metalinguistic difficulties connect to challenges with reading comprehension.

Reciprocal relationship: children's morphological awareness and their reading accuracy across grades 2 to 3.

Across all the domains of child development, we need to understand the temporal relationship between variables suspected to underpin growth; reading research is no exception. We conducted a preliminary evaluation of the direction of the relationship between childrens morphological awareness, or the awareness of and ability to manipulate the smallest meaningful units in words, and their reading accuracy. Participants were 100 Grade 2 children who were tested again in Grade 3. We evaluated the childrens morphological awareness and reading accuracy, each with 2 measures, in both Grades 2 and 3. We evaluated the outcomes in a robust measurement model including controls for phonological awareness, vocabulary, and nonverbal ability. These analyses included autoregressor controls designed to provide insight into the temporal relationship between these 2 skills. We found that childrens early morphological awareness was associated with their growth in reading accuracy to the same extent that their early reading accuracy was associated with their growth in morphological awareness. Our results suggest a bidirectional relationship between childrens morphological awareness and their reading accuracy, a finding that informs current models of reading development.

Getting to the root: Young writers' sensitivity to the role of root morphemes in the spelling of inflected and derived words

The English orthography is morphophonemic: spellings encode both morphemes and phonemes. Questions of the starting point and extent of young childrens understanding of the link between morphemes and spelling are important for theories of spelling development. We conducted two experiments to address these issues. In Experiment 1, 65 six- to eight-year-old English-speaking children spelled just the first sections of inflected, derived and control words. Their spelling of these first segments was better in inflected and derived words than in control words. The findings were replicated in Experiment 2 with 78 six- to eight-year-old children spelling a greater number of items. These two studies converge on the conclusion that, in specific testing situations, six- to eight-year-old children appreciate the role of root morphemes in the spelling of both inflected and derived words. These results are discussed in relation to current models of spelling development.

Chicken or Egg? Untangling the Relationship between Orthographic Processing Skill and Reading Accuracy.

There is increasing evidence of a relationship between orthographic processing skill, or the ability to form, store and access word representations, and reading ability. Empirical research to date has not, however, clarified the direction of this relationship. We examined this question in a three-year longitudinal study of children from Grades 1 to 3. We included standard measures of orthographic processing skill, at both the lexical and sublexical level, and word reading accuracy, as well as controls of vocabulary, non-verbal reasoning, and phonological awareness. In all analyses, word reading predicted progress in acquiring orthographic processing skill, regardless of grade level or orthographic processing measure. In contrast, orthographic processing skill did not predict progress in word reading. Our results suggest that, between Grades 1 and 3, children acquire orthographic processing skill through their reading and that this ability, as characterized by the most common tasks used to date, does not play an independent role in supporting reading acquisition.

How Robust is the Contribution of Morphological Awareness to General Spelling Outcomes

We present analyses of the impact of morphological awareness on spelling. Initial measures of morphological awareness and a number of control measures were taken at age 7 and spelling was assessed two years later (n = 115). Results indicated that the appreciation of morphology in oral language makes a contribution to spelling that is impervious to multiple control variables; it withstands controls for verbal and nonverbal intelligence, rapid automatized naming, verbal short-term memory, and phonological awareness, far more variables than included in prior studies. These results suggest that morphological awareness is a robust variable in determining spelling outcomes.

The Relation Between Morphological Awareness and Reading Comprehension: Evidence From Mediation and Longitudinal Models

We examined the role of a hypothesized factor in reading comprehension: morphological awareness, or the awareness of and ability to manipulate the smallest meaningful units or morphemes. In this longitudinal study, we measured English-speaking children’s morphological awareness, word reading skills, and reading comprehension at Grades 3 and 4, in addition to their phonological awareness, vocabulary, and nonverbal ability as control measures. Path analyses revealed that word reading skills partially mediated the relationship between morphological awareness and reading comprehension at each grade. Further, children’s early morphological awareness partially explained children’s gains in reading comprehension, and their early reading comprehension partially explained their gains in morphological awareness. These findings support the predictions of recent models of reading comprehension: that morphological awareness impacts reading comprehension both indirectly through word reading skills and directly through the language system and that morphological awareness underpins the development of reading comprehension (e.g., Perfetti, Landi, & Oakhill, 2005).

Do children see the danger in dangerous ? Grade 4, 6, and 8 children's reading of morphologically complex words

We examined whether Grade 4, 6, and 8 children access the base form when reading morphologically complex words. We asked children to read words varying systematically in the frequency of the surface and base forms and in the transparency of the base form. At all grade levels, children were faster at reading derived words with high rather than low base frequencies when the words were of low surface frequency. Effects of the frequency and transparency of the base form on word reading accuracy occurred only in Grades 4 and 6. The results add to the growing body of evidence that children access the morphological structure of the words that they encounter in print.

Identifying high-functioning dyslexics: is self-report of early reading problems enough?

We used a questionnaire to identify university students with self-reported difficulties in reading acquisition during elementary school (self-report; n = 31). The performance of the self-report group on standardized measures of word and non-word reading and fluency, passage comprehension and reading rate, and phonological awareness was compared to that of two other groups of university students: one with a recent diagnosis (diagnosed; n = 20) and one with no self-reported reading acquisition problems (comparison group; n = 33). The comparison group outperformed both groups with a history of reading difficulties (self-report and diagnosed) on almost all measures. The self-report and diagnosed groups performed similarly on most tasks, with the exception of untimed reading comprehension (better performance for diagnosed) and reading rate (better performance for self-report). The two recruitment methods likely sample from the same underlying population but identify individuals with different adaptive strategies.