Morphological Awareness and Reading Ability of School-Aged Children from Grades 1 to 3

Objectives: Morphological awareness is the ability to recognize the semantic units and manipulate their structures. In recent years, a growing number of researches suggest that morphological awareness could play an important role in word reading and reading comprehensions. Although there are many studies on various variables related to reading ability, studies on the relations of morphological awareness and reading ability are limited to the Korean language. The aim of this study is to examine the effects of morphological awareness on the decoding and reading comprehension ability of school-aged children from grades 1 to 3. Methods: A correlation analysis among the factors of receptive vocabulary, phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, phonological memory, short-term and working memory, morphological awareness, reading fluency, decoding and reading comprehension ability was conducted among 48 elementary students from grades 1 to 3. Then, a multiple regression analysis was performed to explore the predictive factors for decoding and reading comprehension outcomes. Results: The results of this study were summarized as follows. First, there were significant correlations between morphological awareness and all other variables except for rapid automatized naming. The strongest correlation between morphological awareness and reading comprehension ability was observed. Second, the result of regression analysis indicated that morphological awareness was a significant predictor for the decoding and reading comprehension ability. Conclusion: Results of the present study suggested that morphological awareness was an important factor for the assessment and intervention of improving reading ability which was consistent with previous studies in the English literature. Clinical implications of morphological awareness and directions for further studies are also discussed.