Morphological analysis, phonological analysis and learning to read French: a longitudinal study

This paper presents a longitudinal study, from kindergarten to second grade, which aims to examine the relationship between morphological analysis, phonological analysis and learning to read. Three phonological awareness tasks, five derivational and four inflectional subtests were administered to fifty children at each of the three levels. Evolution of performance was analyzed through the three years. Data showed that with the exception of two subtests, performance increased from kindergarten to first grade and from first grade to second grade, without reaching ceiling performance in second grade, at least for morphological subtests. Links between morphological and phonological analyses were very strong: in particular, syllable segmentation was highly correlated with the morphological subtests in kindergarten while phonemic segmentation was correlated with morphological subtests in first and second grade. There were also strong links between morphological analysis and reading. Regression analyses showed that while phonological awareness explained a major part of variance in first grade, both phonological and morphological scores explained significant part of variance of both decoding and comprehension reading scores in second grade. Thus, this longitudinal study contributes to the evidence of a link between both phonological and morphological analysis and learning to read French.