2. Morphological awareness predicts reading development.
Morphological awareness is the term used to describe one’s sensitivity to
morphological structure and one’s ability to manipulate that structure.
5 Our
prior research has explored the possibility that morphology provides a key to
developing both word knowledge and high quality mental representations and
that knowledge of morphology contributes to success in reading in children
from Grades 1 to 6.
6, 7, 8 We and others have shown that it contributes to word
reading and to reading comprehension.
9, 10
In these studies, other important predictors of reading development (such as
phonological awareness and intelligence) were controlled. This means that the
effects of morphological awareness were not inadvertently due to the other
variables. Furthermore, the effect of morphological awareness was as strong
as that of those other predictors, and often stronger.