Does early awareness of word parts predict how kids read?
Young Greek children's awareness of how words are built from meaningful parts predicted how well they understood what they read two years later, but not how fast they read words.
Source
The Longitudinal Contribution of Early Morphological Awareness Skills to Reading Fluency and Comprehension in Greek
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cohort — Three-wave longitudinal study (kindergarten, grade 1, grade 2) with hierarchical regressions controlling IQ, vocabulary, maternal education, letter knowledge, phonological awareness, RAN and earlier reading.
- N
- N=215 · 215 children in the final sample; 14 others recruited in kindergarten moved away and were lost.
- Population
- Greek-speaking children from 10 kindergartens in Heraklion, Crete, followed to grade 2
- Outcome
- Word reading fluency and cloze-format reading comprehension in grades 1 and 2
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What they did
The researchers tested Greek kindergartners and followed 215 of them to grade 2. In kindergarten and grade 1 children did oral tasks measuring three kinds of morphological awareness: inflection (e.g. plural and tense endings), derivation (building new words with prefixes and suffixes) and compounding (joining two stems). The team then asked whether these skills predicted later word reading fluency and reading comprehension after controlling for non-verbal IQ, vocabulary, mother's education, letter-sound knowledge, phonological awareness, rapid naming and earlier reading ability.
What they found
None of the morphological skills predicted word reading fluency once the other predictors were controlled. In contrast, kindergarten inflectional and derivational awareness each explained a small but significant slice of grade 2 comprehension (about 1-2% of variance), even after controlling grade 1 comprehension; grade 1 morphological skills explained about 2-4%. When all three skills were entered together, only derivational awareness remained a unique predictor, and compounding awareness only mattered when measured in grade 1.
The limits
What it doesn't show
It is correlational, so it cannot show that teaching morphology would improve comprehension; the unique effects are small (a few percent of variance). The fluency test used isolated, mostly simple words, which may have hidden a role for morphology in reading complex words, and both comprehension tests used the same cloze format, so results may not generalise to other kinds of comprehension. The sample came from one Greek city and a transparent orthography taught through phonics, so the pattern may differ in languages like English.
Key terms
- Morphological awareness
- The ability to notice and manipulate the meaningful parts of words (morphemes), such as roots, prefixes, suffixes and endings.
- Inflection vs derivation
- Inflection changes a word's grammatical form (walk to walked) while derivation creates a new word, often of a different class (farm to farmer).
- Rapid automatized naming (RAN)
- How quickly a child can name a repeated set of familiar items such as pictures or digits; a strong predictor of reading fluency.
- Autoregressor
- An earlier measure of the same outcome (e.g. grade 1 comprehension) entered as a control, so any remaining effect predicts change rather than just level.
- Transparent orthography
- A writing system, like Greek or Finnish, where letters map very consistently onto sounds, so decoding accuracy is mastered early.
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Quiz yourself
Which outcome did morphological awareness predict in this study?
Common questions
Why didn't morphology predict reading fluency?
In Greek, words can be sounded out reliably and children are taught with phonics, so speed seems to depend mainly on fast decoding and rapid naming; the fluency test also used mostly simple words.
Why measure morphology orally in kindergarten?
Testing before formal reading instruction and without written items reduces the chance that good early reading is what produced good morphological awareness, rather than the reverse.
Does this mean teachers should teach morphology?
The authors suggest adding morphological activities to phonics teaching, but this study only shows prediction; an intervention trial would be needed to show a causal benefit.
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