PHONOLOGICAL AND MORPHOLOGICAL AWARENESS IN 1ST-GRADERS

Phonological awareness is thought to be related to children's success in learning to read because it indicates an awareness of the internal structure of words. Morphological awareness, which has been found to be related to reading achievement for older students, may offer a more comprehensive measure of linguistic sensitivity because it entails not only phonological awareness, but also other aspects of linguistic knowledge. The research study reported herein was designed to investigate the extent to which phonological awareness contributes to the morphological awareness of first graders and to determine the extent to which phonological and morphological awareness account for variance in word reading. Two tasks of morphological awareness were used, one assessing judgments of morphological relations and the other assessing the production of inflected and derived forms. The children were also given tests of phonological awareness, vocabulary, and word reading. Results showed that phonological awareness contributed significantly to performance on morphological awareness tasks; in addition, children with and without phonemic awareness differed significantly in their ability to produce morphologically complex words. Phonological awareness and morphological awareness contributed significantly to variance in word reading, although the contribution of phonological awareness was the larger of the two. Further studies are needed to investigate the impact of the delayed acquisition of phonological awareness on the development of morphological awareness and the relationship of morphological awareness to reading achievement over the school years.