scholarly journals An investigation of morphological awareness and processing in adults with low literacy

2013 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-273 ◽  
Author(s):  
ELIZABETH L. TIGHE ◽  
KATHERINE S. BINDER

ABSTRACTMorphological awareness, which is an understanding of how words can be broken down into smaller units of meaning such as roots, prefixes, and suffixes, has emerged as an important contributor to word reading and comprehension skills. The first aim of the current study was to investigate the contribution of morphological awareness independent of phonological awareness and decoding to the reading comprehension abilities of adults with low literacy. Results indicated that morphological awareness was a significant unique predictor of reading comprehension. A second aim of the study was to investigate the processing of morphologically complex words of adults with low literacy in both an oral reading passage and a single-word naming task. Adults’ accuracy and response times were measured on different types of morphologically complex words and compared with control words matched on frequency in both the passage and the naming tasks. Results revealed that adults were vulnerable to morphological complexity: they performed more accurately and faster on matched control words versus morphologically complex word types. The educational implications for Adult Basic Education programs are discussed.

2012 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 697-725 ◽  
Author(s):  
MICHAEL J. KIEFFER ◽  
GINA BIANCAROSA ◽  
JEANNETTE MANCILLA-MARTINEZ

ABSTRACTThis study investigated the direct and indirect roles of morphological awareness reading comprehension for Spanish-speaking language minority learners reading in English. Multivariate path analysis was used to investigate the unique contribution of derivational morphological awareness to reading comprehension as well as its indirect contributions via three hypothesized mediators for students in sixth, seventh, and eighth grade (N = 101). Results indicated a significant unique contribution of morphological awareness, controlling for phonemic decoding, listening comprehension, reading vocabulary, word reading fluency, and passage reading fluency. Results further indicated significant indirect contributions of morphological awareness via reading vocabulary and passage fluency, but not via word reading fluency. Findings suggest that morphological awareness may play multiple important roles in second-language reading comprehension.


2013 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer K. Gilbert ◽  
Amanda P. Goodwin ◽  
Donald L. Compton ◽  
Devin M. Kearns

Author(s):  
Wei-Lun Chung ◽  
Gavin M. Bidelman

Purpose: The study aimed to examine whether oral reading prosody—the use of acoustic features (e.g., pitch and duration variations) when reading passages aloud—predicts reading fluency and comprehension abilities. Method: We measured vocabulary, syntax, word reading, reading fluency (including rate and accuracy), reading comprehension (in Grades 3 and 4), and oral reading prosody in Taiwanese third-grade children ( N  = 109). In the oral reading prosody task, children were asked to read aloud a passage designed for third graders and then to answer forced-choice questions. Their oral reading prosody was measured through acoustic analyses including the number of pause intrusions, intersentential pause duration, phrase-final comma pause duration, child–adult pitch match, and sentence-final pitch change. Results: Analyses of variance revealed that children's number of pause intrusions differed as a function of word reading. After controlling for age, vocabulary and syntactic knowledge, and word reading, we found that different dimensions of oral reading prosody contributed to reading rate. In contrast, the number of pause intrusions, phrase-final comma pause duration, and child–adult pitch match predicted reading accuracy and comprehension. Conclusions: Oral reading prosody plays an important role in children's reading fluency and reading comprehension in tone languages like Mandarin. Specifically, children need to read texts prosodically as evidenced by fewer pause intrusions, shorter phrase-final comma pause duration, and closer child–adult pitch match, which are early predictive makers of reading fluency and comprehension.


2018 ◽  
Vol 85 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-211 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathan H. Clemens ◽  
Eric Oslund ◽  
Oi-man Kwok ◽  
Melissa Fogarty ◽  
Deborah Simmons ◽  
...  

This study utilized secondary analyses of a randomized controlled trial and investigated the extent to which prestest word identification efficiency, reading fluency, and vocabulary knowledge moderated the effects of an intervention on reading comprehension outcomes for struggling readers in sixth through eighth grades. Given that the experimental intervention included components that targeted word reading, reading fluency, and vocabulary, we hypothesized that students with lower pretest performance in those skill domains would benefit more from the intervention compared to students with relatively stronger pretest performance or students who received school-implemented (business-as-usual) intervention. Results indicated that pretest word identification efficiency and vocabulary did not moderate the effects of the intervention; however, moderation effects were observed for pretest oral reading fluency such that reading comprehension gains of students with lower pretest fluency were greater in the experimental intervention compared to students with higher pretest fluency or in the comparison condition. Reasons for the moderation effect are discussed. Findings underscore the use of moderation analyses when evaluating multicomponent interventions.


2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 2039-2048
Author(s):  
Kimberly G. Smith ◽  
Anna E. Ryan

Purpose This study examined the relationship between single word reading, connected text reading, and comprehension in persons with aphasia. Method Thirteen persons with aphasia read orally from the Arizona Battery for Reading and Spelling real-word and nonword lists and the Gray Oral Reading Tests–Fifth Edition. The comprehension questions following each paragraph of the Gray Oral Reading Tests–Fifth Edition were answered and scored. The Reading Comprehension Battery for Aphasia–Second Edition provided a measure of silent reading comprehension. Descriptive statistics and Spearman correlation were used to examine associations among reading measures. Results Persons with aphasia showed associations between single word reading and connected text reading accuracy; however, single word reading ability was not associated with oral or silent reading comprehension. Conclusions Although preliminary, the findings provide support for word-level reading abilities underlying connected text reading accuracy but suggest additional cognitive mechanisms are involved in text-level reading comprehension that are not explained by single word reading alone. The findings indicate clinicians should use caution when inferring comprehension abilities from single word reading performance as reading comprehension abilities are likely best assessed using text-level comprehension assessments.


2017 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 507-525 ◽  
Author(s):  
PEDRO VIANA DE FREITAS ◽  
MÁRCIA MARIA PERUZZI ELIA DA MOTA ◽  
S. HÉLÈNE DEACON

ABSTRACTWe investigated the unique effects of morphological awareness on several aspects of reading in Portuguese. We tested 132 Portuguese-speaking children in the fourth grade. Morphological awareness was assessed with a word analogy task that included inflectional and derivational transformations. Results indicated that morphological awareness was a significant predictor of word reading accuracy, word reading fluency, and reading comprehension after controlling for the effects of nonverbal ability and phonological awareness. Morphological awareness also explained unique variance in reading comprehension after adding word reading as a control. In conclusion, morphological awareness has important roles in both word reading and reading comprehension in Portuguese. Educational and clinical implications are discussed.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 333
Author(s):  
Amalia Novita Retaminingrum ◽  
Sri Tiatri ◽  
Soemiarti Patmonodewo

Tujuan dari penelitian ini adalah untuk menguji peran kelancaran membaca awal terhadap pemahaman bacaan. Partisipan adalah 150 siswa kelas empat. Partisipan diberi satu set asesmen yang mencakup beberapa komponen kelancaran membaca awal dan pengukuran atas pemahaman bacaan  fiksi dan non fiksi. Kelancaran membaca awal diukur dengan Early Grade Reading Assessment yang mengukur letter name identification, segmentation (phoneme or syllables), non word reading, oral reading fluency, reading comprehension, listening comprehension, vocabulary, dan dictation.  Pemahaman bacaan fiksi dan non fiksi diukur melalui tes yang dikembangkan berdasarkan Curriculum Based Assessment dari Kurikulum 2013 Indonesia. Analisis regresi dilakukan pada penelitian ini, dan hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa ada dua komponen kelancaran membaca awal yang berhubungan dengan pemahaman bacaan. The goal of this study was to examine the role of early reading fluency in reading comprehension. Participants were 150 fourth-grade children. They were given an assessment that included multiple components of early reading fluency, and a fiction and non fiction text to measure their reading comprehension. For early reading fluency, this study used Early Grade Reading Assessment which measures of letter name identification, segmentation (phoneme or syllables), non word reading, oral reading fluency, reading comprehension, listening comprehension, vocabulary, and dictation. For fiction and non-fiction reading comprehension, this study use Curriculum Based Assessment from 2013 Indonesian Curriculum. Regression analyses were undertaken, the results showed that there are two component of early reading fluency which related to reading comprehension. 


2014 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 1007-1027 ◽  
Author(s):  
KYRIAKOULA M. ROTHOU ◽  
SUSANA PADELIADU

ABSTRACTThe study explored the contribution of two aspects of inflectional morphological awareness, verb inflection and noun–adjective inflection, to word reading and reading comprehension in the Greek language, which is an orthographically transparent language. Participants (120 first graders, 123 second graders, 126 third graders) were given two oral language experimental tasks of inflectional morphological awareness. Furthermore, phonological awareness, receptive vocabulary, expressive vocabulary, decoding, and reading comprehension were evaluated. It was revealed that noun–adjective inflectional morphology contributed significantly to decoding only in first grade, while verb inflectional morphology had a significant contribution to reading comprehension in third grade. It is interesting that inflectional morphological awareness did not predict reading skills for second graders. Phonological awareness was a firm predictor of word reading in all grades and made a unique contribution in Grades 2 and 3. Finally, in all grades, receptive vocabulary was a steady predictor of reading comprehension, whereas expressive vocabulary predicted only first-grade reading comprehension. It is suggested that inflectional morphological awareness may be an important predictor of early reading in a language with a shallow orthography and a rich morphology.


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