Making Meaning: Children's Sensitivity to Morphological Information During Word Reading

In the present study, 81 fifth-grade and 82 eighth-grade children completed a continuous lexical decision priming task that examined their reading times for evidence of sensitivity to the morphological structure of words during reading. A lexical decision task measured students' response times to target words preceded by a prime (which children also read and responded to) that was morphologically related, semantically related, orthographically similar, or unrelated. Analyses of variance indicated that children read target words more quickly and accurately following words that were morphologically related, compared with words that had only semantic or orthographic overlap with targets, with no differences in priming effects between readers of high and average skill. Although differential sensitivity to morphological structure during reading was not associated with reading skill, a secondary regression analysis indicated that children's performance on a measure of explicit morphological production was a significant unique predictor of both word identification and reading comprehension. Although evidence of children's sensitivity to morphological structure during reading does not necessarily prove that morphological processes support children's decoding or comprehension of unfamiliar words encountered in text, documentation of such sensitivity during actual word reading is an important step in the test of such an hypothesis.