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Morphological awareness and reading achievement in university students

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 April 2019

Jamie L. Metsala ,
Rauno Parrila ,
Nicole J. Conrad  and
S. Hélène Deacon Open the ORCID record for S. Hélène Deacon [Opens in a new window]
Jamie L. Metsala*
Affiliation:
Mount Saint Vincent University
Rauno Parrila
Affiliation:
Macquarie University
Nicole J. Conrad
Affiliation:
Saint Mary’s University
S. Hélène Deacon
Affiliation:
Dalhousie University Life Sciences Centre
*
*Corresponding author. Email: Jamie. Metsala@msvu.ca
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Abstract

We examined morphological awareness and reading achievement in university students in two ways. First, students with and without a self-reported history of reading difficulties were compared on word reading and text reading achievement, and on the reading-related skills of morphological awareness, orthographic processing, and phonological processing. Second, the unique contribution of morphological awareness to reading achievement was examined for a larger sample of first-year university students. Students with a self-reported history of reading difficulties (n = 54) showed moderate to large gaps in each area of reading achievement, and timed reading comprehension appeared more severely impaired than word-reading efficiency. These students had a deficit in morphological awareness that persisted even when (a) phonological awareness and orthographic processing skills, or (b) word-reading accuracy were statistically controlled. In the larger first-year sample (N = 211), morphological awareness contributed to variance in word reading beyond that accounted for by phonological awareness and orthographic processing. Furthermore, of the reading-related skills, only morphological awareness made a unique contribution to reading comprehension beyond variance accounted for by word reading. Taken together, these results demonstrate that morphological awareness makes unique contributions to university students’ reading achievement and is an additional difficulty for students with a self-reported history of reading difficulties.

Keywords

morphological awarenessreading achievementreading disabilitiesuniversity students
Type
Original Article
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 40 , Issue 3 , May 2019 , pp. 743 - 763
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2019. 

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