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Early contribution of morphological awareness to literacy skills across languages varying in orthographic consistency

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Abstract

In the present study, we examined the role of morphological awareness in reading and spelling performance across three languages varying in orthographic consistency (English, French, and Greek), after controlling for the effects of phonological awareness and rapid automatized naming (RAN). One hundred fifty-nine English-speaking Canadian, 238 French-speaking Canadian, and 224 Greek children were assessed at the beginning of Grade 2 on measures of morphological awareness, phonological awareness, and RAN. At the end of Grade 2, they were assessed on reading accuracy, reading fluency, reading comprehension, and spelling to dictation. The results indicated that morphological awareness was a unique predictor of reading comprehension and spelling in all three languages, of reading fluency in English and French, and of reading accuracy in English only. Furthermore, the results of multigroup analyses revealed no significant differences in the contribution of morphological awareness to the literacy outcomes across languages. Theoretical and practical implications of these finding are discussed.

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Notes

  1. A common estimate of orthographic transparency is the entropy index based on letter-to-sound mappings. The lower the entropy index is the more transparent the orthography is. The estimate of this index is .83 for English, .46 for French (Ziegler et al., 2010), and .16 for Greek (Protopapas & Vlachou, 2009).

  2. The negative variance of the first indicator of the reading accuracy latent variable had to be fixed at 0 in the French group, thus resulting in a model with 47 degrees of freedom. This constraint did not result in a significant decrement in the model fit and it was deemed necessary to ensure the identification of the measurement model.

  3. The fit of this model was identical to the measurement model because it estimated all relationships between the predictors and the outcomes. However, as in a multiple regression, this model estimated the effect of a predictor when holding constant the effect of the other predictors.

  4. We calculated the change in R² to estimate the unique/incremental variance explained by morphological awareness. We tested a first model in which the effects of the covariates were freely estimated but the effect of morphological awareness was fixed to zero (i.e., equivalent to the first step in a hierarchical regression). We tested a second model (equivalent to the second step of a hierarchical regression) in which both the effects of the covariates and morphological awareness were freely estimated. Therefore, the unique/incremental variance explained by morphological awareness (R² change) is obtained with this formula: R² of model 2 minus R² of model 1. Results of the second model are presented in Tables 4 and 5. All results from the first model are available upon request.

  5. The fit of this model corresponds to the sum of MLRχ 2 for the model previously estimated in each of the three language groups.

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Acknowledgements

This study was funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada grant to the last author (Grant No. RES0002344). We thank all school boards, school principals, teachers, children, and research assistants for their collaboration.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Psychology, University of Ottawa, 136 Jean-Jacques Lussier, Ottawa, ON, K1N 6N5, Canada

    Alain Desrochers & Patrick Gaudreau

  2. Department of Preschool Education, University of Crete, Rethymnon, Greece

    George Manolitsis

  3. Department of Educational Psychology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, T6G 2G5, Canada

    George Georgiou

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  1. Alain Desrochers
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Desrochers, A., Manolitsis, G., Gaudreau, P. et al. Early contribution of morphological awareness to literacy skills across languages varying in orthographic consistency. Read Writ 31, 1695–1719 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-017-9772-y

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