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Morphological awareness and reading achievement in university students
Metsala, Jamie L. Parrila, Rauno Conrad, Nicole J. Deacon, S. Hélène
Metsala, Jamie L.
Parrila, Rauno
Conrad, Nicole J.
Deacon, S. Hélène
Abstract
We examined morphological awareness and reading achievement in university students in two ways. First, students with and without a self-reported history of reading difficulties were compared on word reading and text reading achievement, and on the reading-related skills of morphological awareness, orthographic processing, and phonological processing. Second, the unique contribution of morphological awareness to reading achievement was examined for a larger sample of first-year university students. Students with a self-reported history of reading difficulties (n = 54) showed moderate to large gaps in each area of reading achievement, and timed reading comprehension appeared more severely impaired than word-reading efficiency. These students had a deficit in morphological awareness that persisted even when (a) phonological awareness and orthographic processing skills, or (b) word-reading accuracy were statistically controlled. In the larger first-year sample (N = 211), morphological awareness contributed to variance in word reading beyond that accounted for by phonological awareness and orthographic processing. Furthermore, of the reading-related skills, only morphological awareness made a unique contribution to reading comprehension beyond variance accounted for by word reading. Taken together, these results demonstrate that morphological awareness makes unique contributions to university students’ reading achievement and is an additional difficulty for students with a self-reported history of reading difficulties.
Keywords
morphological awareness, reading achievement, reading disabilities, university students
Date
2019
Type
Journal article
Journal
Applied Psycholinguistics
Book
Volume
40
Issue
3
Page Range
743-763
Article Number
ACU Department
Faculty of Education and Arts
Collections
Relation URI
Source URL
Event URL
Open Access Status
License
All rights reserved
File Access
Controlled