| The morpho-phonemic nature of English orthography predicts that successful readers of English must have awareness of both phonemes and morphemes. While the relationship of phoneme awareness and reading success is well-established, the relationship of morphological awareness and reading success is less understood and more complex. Nineteen low-literacy prison inmates, 39 normal inmates (age-matched controls), and 98 children in grades 3-6 (reading-ability-matched controls) were tested on a battery of IQ and reading tests and on a four-part Morphological Sensitivity Test (MST) which tests knowledge of the syntactic category of common noun, verb, and adjective suffixes (part I), the ability to abstract this knowledge and generalize it to novel forms (part II), the ability to distinguish derivationally-related from pseudo-related word pairs (part III), and awareness of differences in word-internal boundaries (part IV). Half the materials on parts I-III where presented orally and half in written form to avoid confounding morphological awareness with phonemic decoding ability. Significant correlations were found between parts I-III of the MST and all measures of reading ability. On parts I and II, the scores of the low-literacy adults were nearly identical to those of the third graders and to children at all grades who were classified by their teachers as "poor readers." Scores on part III showed significant effects of both age and reading ability. On parts I-III, as reading ability improved, the differences between scores on the spoken and written presentations decreased, and both types of scores approached ceiling. Part IV of the MST was problematic because the results were inconsistent. The general conclusion was that deficiencies in syntactic category knowledge are associated with reading failure and persist into adulthood. Thus, reading failure can be attributed to a lack of decoding ability at both the level of the phoneme and the level of the morpheme, although the unique contribution of morpheme awareness to explaining reading variance may be small. Possible applications for screening and remediation were discussed. |
