Morphological Awareness and Learning to Read: A Cross-Language Perspective

TLDR

Morphological awareness, the ability to reflect on and manipulate morphemes, has become a focal point of research, yet its close ties to phonological, syntactic, and vocabulary skills and the lack of controlled studies limit current understanding. This review critically synthesizes empirical studies on morphological awareness from a broad cross‑linguistic perspective. The authors compile and evaluate cross‑linguistic empirical evidence to assess how morphological awareness develops and relates to reading. Across languages, children acquire inflectional morphology before derivational and compound morphology; morphological awareness facilitates decoding of complex words and reading comprehension, with a reciprocal relationship, and increasingly predicts reading outcomes as children age.

Abstract

Abstract In the past decade, there has been a surge of interest in morphological awareness, which refers to the ability to reflect on and manipulate morphemes and word formation rules in a language. This review provides a critical synthesis of empirical studies on this topic from a broad cross-linguistic perspective. Research with children speaking several languages indicates that knowledge of inflectional morphology is acquired before knowledge of derivational morphology and the morphology of compounds, which continue to develop through the elementary school years. Research establishes that morphological awareness contributes to the decoding of morphologically complex words and contributes to the development of reading comprehension, although the relationship is probably reciprocal rather than unidirectional. Morphological awareness becomes an increasingly important predictor of measures of reading as children grow older. Morphological awareness is intertwined with other aspects of metalinguistic awareness and linguistic competence—notably, phonological awareness, syntactic awareness, and vocabulary knowledge. Lack of satisfactory control of these intertwined elements is one of several shortcomings of the existing literature.