Contribution of morphological awareness to reading fluency of children with and without dyslexia: evidence from a transparent orthography

The impact of morphological density on reading comprehension in Arabic: A comparison between typically developing and children with reading disabilities

This study examined the influence of morphological density on reading comprehension in Arabic and whether this influence differs between typical and children with reading disabilities. Morphological density in Arabic is a text feature that refers to using bound morphemes, creating dense words with more morphemes. The participants were 182 fifth-graders, both typical and children with reading disabilities. Children were assessed in reading comprehension by reading texts with low- or high-morphological density. Findings revealed that overall morphological density impacted reading comprehension performance. That is, scores were found to be higher while reading low-density text than high-density text. Moreover, an interaction of morphological density condition by reading proficiency showed no density text effect among typical developing readers. However, a difference was obtained in the children with reading disabilities whereas low-morphological density text score was higher than the score of high-morphological density text. The study highlights the importance of morphological awareness in reading comprehension in Arabic, extending that morphological density plays an important role in this process. The results are discussed in light of the lexical quality hypothesis and simple view of reading model. The findings imply the need of explicit morphological instruction for dense morphological forms.

Exploring the Relations of Morphological Awareness with Phonological Awareness and Vocabulary: The Case of the Greek Language

Although relations between morphological awareness, phonological awareness, and vocabulary have been widely observed, questions remain about their precise associations. The purpose of the present study was to explore the relations of morphological awareness with two highly related linguistic skills (phonological awareness and vocabulary) in a transparent orthography with rich morphology. The study sample consisted of 121 (58 males, Mean age = 93.94 months, SD = 3.32) 2nd grade Greek-speaking children. Confirmatory factor analysis revealed that the three-factor model provided the best fit to the data, indicating that although morphological awareness, phonological awareness, and vocabulary are highly correlated, they represent distinct linguistic constructs. In addition, hierarchical regression analysis was used to examine the bidirectional effects between the three linguistic skills. Results revealed that both phonological awareness and vocabulary significantly contributed to morphological awareness, with phonological awareness having a stronger effect. Conversely, morphological awareness significantly affected both phonological awareness and vocabulary. The effect size from phonological awareness and vocabulary to morphological awareness was similar to the effect size reported from morphological awareness to phonological awareness and vocabulary. These results suggest that morphological awareness is highly associated with phonological awareness and vocabulary, being though a distinct skill. In addition, it seems that these linguistic skills have bidirectional effects with each other in first grades.