An investigation of the relationship of morphological awareness to reading comprehension in fourth and sixth graders

The aim of this study was to examine the influences of different types of morphological awareness on the reading comprehension abilities of fourth and sixth graders. Participants' morphological awareness skills were assessed with four different experimental measures of morphological awareness. The measures varied on two primary dimensions: the metalinguistic demands required and the type of derivational knowledge tapped (i.e., relational knowledge and/or syntactic/distributional knowledge). Structural Equation Modeling was used to test a model of reading comprehension that included these four measures of morphological awareness. Other variables included in the model were nonword decoding, picture vocabulary, morphologically complex word reading, and general word reading. Reading comprehension, as assessed by a standardized cloze-format task, was represented in the model as the final outcome. Overall, the model accounted for 51% of the variance in reading comprehension. The results also showed that two of the morphological awareness measures significantly and directly affected the reading of morphologically complex words and reading comprehension for both grades. Moreover, the results seemed to suggest that it is the ability to process both the semantic and syntactic aspects of morphology (i.e., relational knowledge and syntactic/distributional knowledge) that is most important for reading comprehension in the middle-to-late elementary grades.