Language Contributions to Early Word Reading Success

Literacy success depends on various language components such as, morphological awareness, phonological awareness, and orthographic knowledge. Morphological awareness is the ability to recognize and manipulate morphemes, the smallest meaningful parts of language. Phonological awareness is the ability to identify and manipulate speech sounds and sound patterns. Orthographic knowledge is the ability to store and recall written forms of words. Currently, morphological awareness is not taught until later elementary and middle school years despite emerging evidence that morphological awareness develops before the onset of formal reading instruction. Evidence also suggests that morphological awareness intervention may boost literacy skills for children with typical and disordered reading abilities, such as dyslexia. In this study, we will examine independent contributions of various language components, such as morphological awareness, to word-reading abilities in young school-age children. We hypothesize that morphological awareness, phonological awareness, and orthographic knowledge independently contribute to word-reading skills in early elementary school children. Additionally, we expect to find a potential facilitation effect of phonological awareness through morphological awareness on learning new words. In our study, 78 typically developing first-grade children completed a dynamic assessment of morphological awareness and were administered a battery of language and literacy assessments. We will examine the results for correlations or mediating factors