Looking at the underlying dimensions in morphological awareness tasks

Despite the importance of morphological awareness for the development of high-level skills essential to academic success (Apel, Diehm et Apel, 2013; Kieffer et al. 2016; Tighe et Schatschneider; 2016), there is confusion in the literature regarding the measurement of this construct, in that the tasks used to assess it involve extremely varied cognitive and linguistic skills (Deacon, Parrila and Kirby, 2008). Based on the tasks traditionally used to measure morphological awareness, we constructed six tasks who mobilize various units (flexional/derivational), operations (deletion/addition) and levels of control (implicit/explicit) (Apel, 2014). Our data was collected from 8 to 10 years old children from Quebec and France. To understand how the tasks are grouped, we performed confirmatory factor analyzes (CFA), which highlight the importance of the type of cognitive operations performed as a factor that makes it possible to explain variation between the tasks.