Morphological awareness demonstrated by first-grade children on an oral and written measure

Morphological awareness is one linguistic factor that has been found to be related to literacy achievement. Limited and conflicting research exists, however, regarding the morphological awareness of children in the early elementary grades and the relevance of morphological awareness to early literacy instruction. This study was designed to further investigate the early development of morphological awareness. Forty-three first-grade children were administered an oral morphological production task and a written spelling task at the beginning of the academic year. Results indicated that the first-grade children were able to generate words reflecting morphological relationships, before they have received any explicit instruction regarding morphological relations between words. In addition, the children showed an ability to use morphological information to guide their spelling of single words, as evidenced by a difference in patterns of spellings between one- and two-morpheme words. Performance on the oral morphological production task was found to be significantly and positively correlated with performance on two-morpheme words on the written spelling measure. Implications for literacy instruction and clinical intervention are discussed.