The Mediating Effects of Vocabulary between Morphological Awareness and Reading Comprehension in School-aged Children

Objectives: Morphological awareness refers to the ability to recognize and manipulate the smallest meaningful structure of words. Recent studies have shown that morphological awareness is particularly relevant for understanding language development, especially vocabulary knowledge, and reading skills. The purpose of this study was to investigate the mediating effect of vocabulary knowledge on the relationship between morphological awareness and reading comprehension. Methods: Participants in this study were 278 children in first through sixth grade of two elementary schools in a Metropolitan city. Tests of morphological awareness on derived affixes, receptive vocabulary and reading comprehension were carried out. In order to estimate the mediating effect, correlation analysis and regression analysis were conducted using the Baron & Kanny and Sobel test. Results: In our results, morphological awareness significantly predicted reading comprehension. The partial mediating effect of vocabulary was also showed throughout the elementary grade group. Conclusion: Our findings show that morphological awareness contributes to reading comprehension indirectly through language systems such as vocabulary knowledge. These results suggested that skilled morphological awareness competence may have an impact on enhancing vocabulary acquisition and eventually academic reading skills which are based on language skills. Also, the need for vocabulary intervention, including deep and rich morphological instruction, was discussed. Limitations and suggestions were also added.