Morphological awareness and reading abilities in second- and third-grade Hebrew readers

Abstract

The contribution of morphological awareness to reading comprehension in Hebrew was tested in 100 second- and third-grade students on three types of morphology: inflections, derivations, and construct formation, controlling for vocabulary knowledge. Third graders performed better than second graders on inflectional and construct formation awareness, but only derivations and construct formation predicted success in reading comprehension. Significant differences in reading comprehension but not in orthographic word recognition and phonological decoding were found between students with low and high morphological awareness. The results highlight the importance of examining the unique contribution of different components of morphological awareness to reading comprehension"