The relationship between morphological awareness and reading comprehension in Spanish‐speaking children

In the last decades, a series of studies has explored the role of morphological awareness on reading comprehension. Path analysis studies performed in English have shown that morphological awareness benefits reading comprehension both directly and indirectly, through word decoding. This issue has se...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Scandinavian journal of psychology 2019-12, Vol.60 (6), p.501-512
Main Authors: D'Alessio, María Josefina, Jaichenco, Virginia, Wilson, Maximiliano A.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Argentina
Awareness - physiology
Child
Children
Comprehension - physiology
Female
Humans
Language Development
literacy acquisition
Male
Morphological awareness
Morphology
Psycholinguistics
Reading
Reading comprehension
Spanish
Synesthesia
word decoding
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Summary:In the last decades, a series of studies has explored the role of morphological awareness on reading comprehension. Path analysis studies performed in English have shown that morphological awareness benefits reading comprehension both directly and indirectly, through word decoding. This issue has seldom been explored in Spanish. The aim of this study was to replicate in Spanish the results previously found in English. We used path analysis to assess three alternative models of the relationship between morphological awareness, word decoding and reading comprehension in 4th grade Spanish‐speaking children. Contrary to English, we found that morphological awareness benefits reading comprehension only directly. We conclude that in Spanish, in which accurate and fluent pronunciation of written words can be achieved through grapheme‐to‐phoneme conversion rules, morphological awareness does not help the correct pronunciation of words. Thus, morphological awareness is not relevant for word decoding in Spanish but is related to reading comprehension since this type of morphological knowledge provides access to the semantic and syntactic information of new words.
ISSN:0036-5564
1467-9450
DOI:10.1111/sjop.12578