Which spoken-language skills help poor kids start reading?
In children just starting to read, spoken-language skills like vocabulary and word-structure knowledge were linked to reading only indirectly, through listening comprehension and sound awareness.
Source
What Is the Influence of Morphological Knowledge in the Early Stages of Reading Acquisition Among Low SES Children? A Graphical Modeling Approach
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cross-sectional — Single-timepoint battery of oral language and reading tests analysed with exploratory graphical modelling followed by structural equation models
- N
- N=703 · 703 first-graders from 30 classes in French Priority Education Area schools, tested once in November of Grade 1
- Population
- French first-grade children (about 6 years old) from low socio-economic status families
- Outcome
- Word reading and pseudoword reading (decoding) fluency and their links to listening comprehension, vocabulary, phonemic awareness and morphological awareness
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What they did
The researchers tested 703 French first-graders from low-income school areas after 3 months of reading instruction. Each child did individual tests of listening comprehension, receptive vocabulary, phonemic awareness, three morphological awareness tasks, non-verbal IQ, and one-minute word and pseudoword reading. They used a data-driven graphical model to find which skills were directly connected, then tested directed versions of that network with structural equation modelling.
What they found
Listening comprehension sat at the hub of the network: vocabulary, non-verbal IQ, morphological tasks and phonemic awareness all connected to it. Phonemic awareness was the only direct link to word reading, and word reading in turn led to pseudoword reading, the reverse of the usual decoding-first view. Morphological awareness influenced reading only indirectly, and one morphological task also fed phonemic awareness directly. An extended model adding paths from vocabulary and sentence completion to phonemic awareness fit best, with an RMSEA of 0.088.
The limits
What it doesn't show
All measures were taken at one time point, so the arrows in the models are statistical inferences from correlations, not demonstrated causes; the authors' 'causal' language should be read cautiously. Model fit was only acceptable, not excellent, and the best model was reached partly by adding paths suggested by modification indices. The sample was entirely low-SES French children, and the authors note they did not account for children's multilingual home backgrounds. The study does not test any teaching intervention, so it cannot say that training morphology would improve reading.
Key terms
- Morphological awareness
- The ability to notice and manipulate the smallest meaningful parts of words, such as the root and suffix in 'runner'.
- Phonemic awareness
- The ability to hear and manipulate the individual sounds (phonemes) in spoken words.
- Simple view of reading
- A model that treats reading comprehension as the product of word recognition and oral language comprehension, seen as separate abilities.
- Pseudoword reading
- Reading made-up but pronounceable strings, used to measure decoding because the child cannot rely on remembering the word.
- Graphical modelling
- A statistical approach that maps which variables remain linked after accounting for all the others, shown as a network of nodes and edges.
- Structural equation modelling
- A technique that tests how well a proposed set of directed relationships between variables fits the observed correlations.
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Quiz yourself
When were the children tested?
Common questions
Does this mean teaching vocabulary will not help early reading?
No. The study found vocabulary's link to word reading was indirect, via listening comprehension and phonemic awareness, not absent. It also did not test teaching, so it cannot rule out benefits of instruction.
Why was word reading linked to decoding rather than the other way round?
The authors suggest that after only a few months of instruction children have limited letter-sound skills and lean on known words, so recognising familiar words may help build decoding.
Can these results be applied to English-speaking children?
Only with caution: French spelling is more regular than English, and all children were from low-income areas, so the network could differ elsewhere.
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