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

TLDR

Few studies have examined how morphological and phonological awareness influence reading in morphophonemic English orthography. A 4‑year longitudinal study of grades 2–5 compared morphological and phonological awareness across pseudoword reading, reading comprehension, and single‑word reading. Morphological awareness significantly predicted pseudoword reading and comprehension—comparable to phonological awareness and persisting for three years—yet had little effect on single‑word reading, indicating a broad role beyond phonology.

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.