Preschool Phonological and Morphological Awareness As Longitudinal Predictors of Early Reading and Spelling Development in Greek

Abstract

Different language skills are considered fundamental for successful reading and spelling acquisition. Extensive evidence has highlighted the central role of phonological awareness in early literacy experiences. However, many orthographic systems also require the contribution of morphological awareness. The goal of this study was to examine the morphological and phonological awareness skills of preschool children as longitudinal predictors of reading and spelling ability by the end of first grade, controlling for the effects of receptive and expressive vocabulary skills. At Time 1 preschool children from kindergartens in the Greek regions of Attika, Crete, Macedonia, and Thessaly were assessed on tasks tapping receptive and expressive vocabulary, phonological awareness (syllable and phoneme), and morphological awareness (inflectional and derivational). Tasks were administered through an Android application for mobile devices (tablets) featuring automatic application of ceiling rules. At Time 2 one year later the same children attending first grade were assessed on measures of word and pseudoword reading, text reading fluency, text reading comprehension, and spelling. Complete data from 104 children are available. Hierarchical linear regression and commonality analyses were conducted for each outcome variable. Reading accuracy for both words and pseudowords was predicted not only by phonological awareness, as expected, but also by morphological awareness, suggesting that understanding the functional role of word parts supports the developing phonology–orthography mappings. However, only phonological awareness predicted text reading fluency at this age. Longitudinal prediction of reading comprehension by both receptive vocabulary and morphological awareness was already evident at this age, as expected. Finally, spelling was predicted by preschool phonological awareness, as expected, as well as by morphological awareness, the contribution of which is expected to increase due to the spelling demands of Greek inflectional and derivational suffixes introduced at later grades.

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ORIGINAL RESEARCH
published: 27 November 2017
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02039
Edited by:
Daniela Traficante,
Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore,
Italy
Reviewed by:
Susan Rvachew,
McGill University, Canada
Barbara T. Conboy,
University of Washington,
United States
*Correspondence:
Vassiliki Diamanti
vasiliki.diamanti@isp.uio.no
Specialty section:
This article was submitted to
Language Sciences,
a section of the journal
Frontiers in Psychology
Received: 27 June 2017
Accepted: 07 November 2017
Published: 27 November 2017
Citation:
Diamanti V, Mouzaki A, Ralli A,
Antoniou F, Papaioannou S and
Protopapas A (2017) Preschool
Phonological and Morphological
Awareness As Longitudinal Predictors
of Early Reading and Spelling
Development in Greek.
Front. Psychol. 8:2039.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02039
Preschool Phonological and
Morphological Awareness As
Longitudinal Predictors of Early
Reading and Spelling Development
in Greek
Vassiliki Diamanti1,2*, Angeliki Mouzaki1, Asimina Ralli3, Faye Antoniou3,
Sofia Papaioannou4and Athanassios Protopapas2
1Department of Primary Education, University of Crete, Rethymno, Greece, 2Department of Special Needs Education,
University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway, 3Department of Philosophy, Pedagogy, and Psychology, National and Kapodistrian
University of Athens, Athens, Greece, 4Department of Medicine, University of Crete, Rethymno, Greece
Different language skills are considered fundamental for successful reading and
spelling acquisition. Extensive evidence has highlighted the central role of phonological
awareness in early literacy experiences. However, many orthographic systems also
require the contribution of morphological awareness. The goal of this study was to
examine the morphological and phonological awareness skills of preschool children as
longitudinal predictors of reading and spelling ability by the end of first grade, controlling
for the effects of receptive and expressive vocabulary skills. At Time 1 preschool children
from kindergartens in the Greek regions of Attika, Crete, Macedonia, and Thessaly
were assessed on tasks tapping receptive and expressive vocabulary, phonological
awareness (syllable and phoneme), and morphological awareness (inflectional and
derivational). Tasks were administered through an Android application for mobile devices
(tablets) featuring automatic application of ceiling rules. At Time 2 one year later
the same children attending first grade were assessed on measures of word and
pseudoword reading, text reading fluency, text reading comprehension, and spelling.
Complete data from 104 children are available. Hierarchical linear regression and
commonality analyses were conducted for each outcome variable. Reading accuracy
for both words and pseudowords was predicted not only by phonological awareness,
as expected, but also by morphological awareness, suggesting that understanding
the functional role of word parts supports the developing phonology–orthography
mappings. However, only phonological awareness predicted text reading fluency at this
age. Longitudinal prediction of reading comprehension by both receptive vocabulary
and morphological awareness was already evident at this age, as expected. Finally,
spelling was predicted by preschool phonological awareness, as expected, as well as
by morphological awareness, the contribution of which is expected to increase due to
the spelling demands of Greek inflectional and derivational suffixes introduced at later
grades.
Keywords: morphological awareness, phonological awareness, reading, spelling, longitudinal study
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Diamanti et al. Preschool Predictors of Early Literacy
INTRODUCTION
Reading and spelling are considerable cognitive undertakings
that require the integration of written and spoken language. An
overwhelming body of research evidence suggests that children’s
phonological awareness, which requires conscious reflection
upon and explicit manipulation of the constituent speech sounds
of language, is a necessary requirement for the acquisition of the
alphabetic principle (Byrne, 1996) and a key skill for mastering
decoding (National Reading Panel, 2000;Lonigan et al., 2009)
and spelling across orthographies (Cataldo and Ellis, 1988;Ellis
and Cataldo, 1990;Byrne and Fielding-Barnsley, 1991, 1993;
Porpodas, 1999;Aidinis and Nunes, 2001;Caravolas et al.,
2001, 2005;Cardoso-Martins and Pennington, 2004;Furnes and
Samuelsson, 2010).
On the other hand, morphological awareness plays a
fundamental role in mastering decoding, reading fluency, and
comprehension (Deacon and Kirby, 2004;Kuo and Anderson,
2006;Tong et al., 2011;Kirby et al., 2012;Deacon et al.,
2014;Muroya et al., 2017) and orthographic spelling (Deacon
and Kirby, 2004;Deacon and Bryant, 2005, 2006;Desrochers
et al., 2017) across orthographies (Wei et al., 2014;Rothou and
Padeliadu, 2015;Grigorakis and Manolitsis, 2016;Pan et al.,
2016;Vaknin-Nusbaum et al., 2016a,b;Muroya et al., 2017).
Morphological awareness refers to (a) an explicit understanding
of morphological relations between word forms and meanings,
such as grammatical inflection and productive derivation, and
(b) the ability to manipulate the morphological structure of
words (Carlisle, 1995). The present study aimed to examine the
predictive value of preschool morphological and phonological
awareness in learning to read and spell.
Morphological Awareness and Literacy
Development
It has been forcefully argued that reading comprehension
cannot succeed unless the reader appreciates morphological
word formation, that is, how differences in word forms relate
to differences in meaning (Carlisle, 2003). This suggests that
an explicit understanding of morphological relations, termed
morphological awareness, is a prerequisite to skilled reading.
In fact morphological awareness is related not only to reading
comprehension, but also to spelling (e.g., Deacon et al., 2009;
Casalis et al., 2011), vocabulary (McBride-Chang et al., 2005;
Sparks and Deacon, 2015), and word and pseudoword reading
(Deacon and Kirby, 2004;Kirby et al., 2012). The contribution
of morphological awareness to spelling is robust to a multitude of
control variables (Deacon et al., 2009) and includes both inflected
and derived forms (Deacon et al., 2010) beyond the spelling of
specific morphemes (Casalis et al., 2011).
Deacon and Kirby (2004) examined the role of both
phonological and morphological awareness in learning to read
for English-speaking Canadian children. They investigated the
longitudinal prediction of Grades 3, 4, and 5 pseudoword
reading, single word reading, and reading comprehension from
Grade 2 phonological and morphological awareness. They
found that morphological awareness made a small but unique
contribution to all aspects of reading development – mainly
pseudoword reading and reading comprehension – during the
3 years of middle elementary school, over and beyond the
effect of phonological awareness. They argued that morphological
awareness might have accounted for more variance in the reading
variables if multiple measures of various formats and tapping
a broader range of derivations and inflections had been used.
The present study addressed this methodological limitation by
assessing children in an elaborate and systematic battery of
phonological and morphological awareness tasks.
In another study of English-speaking Canadian children,
Deacon et al. (2009) examined the predictive value of
morphological awareness, assessed in the early school years, for
the prediction of spelling, assessed in middle elementary grades.
They reported that Grade 2 morphological awareness accounted
for approximately 8% of the variance in Grade 4 general spelling
skills, beyond the effect of verbal and non-verbal intelligence,
phonological awareness, verbal short-term memory, and rapid-
automatized naming (RAN).
Few studies have studied the contribution of morphological
awareness assessed before the onset of formal reading instruction.
Casalis and Louis-Alexandre (2000) studied the longitudinal
contribution of phonological and morphological awareness to
decoding and reading comprehension. They assessed French-
speaking kindergarten children in a variety of morphological
awareness tasks measuring both inflectional and derivational
morphology. Their findings showed strong correlations between
phonological and morphological awareness tasks, as well as
unique contributions of both skills to Grade 2 decoding skills
and reading comprehension. However, they only analyzed the
correlations for individual tasks and did not examine the overall
effects of morphological and phonological awareness skills by
considering all the corresponding tasks together. Therefore,
the total magnitude of the longitudinal relationship remained
unknown.
More recently, using latent variable modeling in Chinese, Pan
et al. (2016) found that pre-literate syllable and morphological
awareness predicted character reading, reading fluency, reading
comprehension, and writing at the age of 11 years, beyond any
effects of phonological awareness, but only indirectly, that is,
through post-literate morphological awareness assessed at the
ages of 7–10 years.
The longitudinal relation between early morphological
awareness and reading and spelling skills has also been studied
in Greek. Manolitsis (2006) found that morphological awareness,
assessed in kindergarten, longitudinally predicted Grade 1 word
reading but its contribution to accuracy was not significant
when kindergarten phonological awareness was controlled for.
Pittas and Nunes (2014) assessed first and third graders in three
morphological awareness tasks: a pseudoword inflection task,
a sentence analogy task, and a morphological relatedness task.
They found a unique contribution of morphological awareness to
reading – but not to spelling – assessed 8 months later, even after
partialling out the effects of grade, verbal ability, phonological
awareness, and initial reading level.
Grigorakis and Manolitsis (2016) examined the longitudinal
prediction of Greek morphological spelling from morphological
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awareness measured before and at the beginning of formal
literacy instruction. They assessed 229 kindergarten children
5–6 years old on a variety of morphological awareness tasks
measuring their ability to recognize and manipulate inflections,
derivations, and compound words. Spelling of inflectional
suffixes in words and pseudowords was assessed at Grades 1
and 2. Morphological awareness was a significant longitudinal
predictor of word spelling, surviving control for verbal and
non-verbal intelligence, verbal short-term memory, receptive
and expressive vocabulary, letter sound knowledge, RAN, and
phonological awareness.
Finally, in a cross-linguistic study comparing English, French,
and Greek, Desrochers et al. (2017) found that Greek children’s
morphological awareness skills at the beginning of Grade 2 were
unique predictors of reading comprehension and spelling, but not
of reading accuracy – as in English – and fluency – as in both
English and French – at the end of the same grade.
Evidence for the importance of morphological awareness has
also been provided by intervention studies. If morphological
awareness forms a critical substrate for reading development,
then training in morphological awareness, if successful, should
lead to measurable improvements in reading performance. Due
to their experimental – rather than correlational – nature, studies
of morphological awareness training constitute an empirically
crucial source of evidence regarding the connection between
morphological awareness and literacy. Indeed, instruction
in morphological awareness has been shown to result in
benefits across literacy domains, especially when combined with
phonological awareness training (e.g., Lyster, 2002;Lyster et al.,
2016;Manolitsis, 2017; see meta-analyses and systematic reviews
in Reed, 2008;Bowers et al., 2010;Carlisle, 2010;Goodwin and
Ahn, 2010, 2013).
However, even though dozens of morphological awareness
studies have accumulated to date, as seen in the aforementioned
reviews, a confident conclusion remains unwarranted because
it has been challenging to establish the specificity of training.
The majority of studies have failed to employ an active control
group receiving instruction of similar structure and intensity
but non-morphological in content. Indeed, many studies have
simply compared the experimental group to a passive control
group not receiving any special instruction but following the
regular classroom program. When active control groups are
employed the benefits to literacy from morphological training are
not significantly stronger (e.g., comparing against phonological
awareness training; Lyster, 2002;Lyster et al., 2016).
An additional difficulty with the theoretical interpretation of
the majority of these training studies is that they have relied,
at least in part, on printed materials or strategies potentially
exploiting the orthographic knowledge of participants, thereby
obscuring the origin of the observed effects. That is, although
the focus of the instruction was on the morphological aspects of
words, if training took place using written words then children
may have exhibited literacy gains due to the fact that they
received a form of reading or spelling instruction rather than to
morphological awareness per se.
In sum, despite the recent surge in interest in the relationship
between morphological awareness and reading skill development,
and the strong evidence for its importance, the relevant literature
has not conclusively established the precedence, or necessity,
of morphological awareness for reading development and for
particular reading skills. Many studies have examined concurrent
correlations and most have assessed children in elementary
grades, for which reciprocal effects may have contributed to
the reported findings. That is, if morphological awareness is
assessed after the onset of reading instruction, it is possible
that exposure to the various printed word types may have
contributed to the further development of morphological
awareness. Therefore, a finding of robust correlations may
conceivably be due to an inverse direction of causation than
typically hypothesized.
Although longitudinal studies are one step toward addressing
this shortcoming, it is also critical that the first assessment
of morphological awareness takes place before the onset of
reading instruction, to minimize effects of exposure to print. This
requires the development and validation of appropriate testing
materials for preschoolers that arguably address metalinguistic
morphological skills. In the present study we have thus examined
the longitudinal prediction of early (Grade 1) reading skills by
preschool morphological awareness, controlling for phonological
awareness and vocabulary. To obtain a more nearly complete
picture of the importance of morphological awareness for reading
skill development, we have applied a comprehensive battery of
reading outcomes, including word and pseudoword accuracy,
reading fluency, reading comprehension, as well as spelling.
Development and Assessment of
Morphological Awareness
Typical language development involves unconscious use of
morphology. Very young children produce overgeneralizations,
such as “buyed” (instead of “bought”). The production of
these errors suggests a gradual development in understanding
the rules of inflectional morphology (Berko, 1958;Selby,
1972). Nonetheless, the boundary between tacit knowledge of
morphological processes and conscious morphological awareness
has not been sufficiently investigated. In many cases it is not clear
whether differences in measures of morphological awareness
reflect differences in metalinguistic awareness or in implicit
morphological knowledge (Nagy et al., 2014). Metalinguistic
awareness is thought to be a special kind of linguistic
functioning, beyond language acquisition, which develops in
middle childhood (Tunmer et al., 1984).
The morphological processes of grammatical inflection and
productive derivation seem to follow a similar but non-
simultaneous developmental progression. Evidence shows that
awareness of inflectional morphology is acquired in the first
school years (Diakogiorgi et al., 2005;Kuo and Anderson, 2006),
whereas awareness of derivational morphology develops toward
the fourth year (Anglin, 1993;Carlisle, 2000), and continues to
grow throughout the school years (Berko, 1958;Anglin, 1993;
Berninger et al., 2010). Carlisle (1995) suggested that children’s
awareness of derivational morphology makes a transition from
an implicit to an explicit level at the ages of kindergarten and first
grade.
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Morphological awareness tasks have been classified according
to their cognitive and meta-cognitive requirements, which may
operate at either an implicit or an explicit level (Deacon et al.,
2008). Lexical judgment tasks, which require children to decide
whether two words are related or not, have been widely used
to assess implicit morphological skills (e.g., Mahony et al., 2000;
Duncan et al., 2009), whereas analogy and production tasks have
been used to tap explicit skills (e.g., Berko, 1958;Derwing, 1976;
Nunes et al., 1997;Carlisle, 2000;Kirby et al., 2012). Production
tasks have also been differentiated between implicit and explicit
(Casalis and Louis-Alexandre, 2000).
Diamanti et al. (in press) recently examined the development
of morphological awareness in Greek children 4–7 years old.
They compared the domains of inflectional and derivational
morphology, adopting a distinction between two levels, namely
epilinguistic control and metalinguistic awareness. Epilinguistic
control refers to an intermediate level of elementary awareness
that has been posited to intervene developmentally between
the acquisition of the linguistic skill and the acquisition
of metalinguistic awareness (Gombert, 1992). In contrast,
metalinguistic awareness refers to the individual’s ability to reflect
upon and consciously manipulate morphemes, as well as the
ability to deliberately apply word formation rules. Following
Carlisle (1995), epilinguistic control is evidenced in judgment
tasks, whereas full-blown metalinguistic awareness is evidenced
in production tasks (see Diamanti et al., in press, for further
discussion). In addition to the expected performance increase
with age, Diamanti et al. (in press) found that a single factor
sufficed and accounted for 0.59 of the variance in the four
tasks, consistent with a common developmental path underlying
both domains and both levels of morphological awareness. In
comparison of the developmental growth curves among tasks,
they found that production of derivational morphemes was
more difficult than production of inflectional morphemes and
judgment of derivational morphemes, whereas the differences
between the two inflectional tasks and between the two judgment
tasks were not significant.
Given these findings, Diamanti et al. (in press) suggested that
at these ages epilinguistic control is similarly effective for the two
morphological domains whereas full metalinguistic awareness
of derivational morphology trails behind that of inflectional
morphology, at least as measured by these specific tasks. Thus, on
the one hand, this study highlighted the need for early tracking
and distinctions among levels and domains of morphological
awareness. On the other hand, it demonstrated the reliability
and validity of the materials used and the potential of this
combination of subscales to form a reliable and coherent scale
for overall wide-range assessment of morphological awareness
in the preschool and early elementary school age range. The
present study is a follow-up of a subset of the children in that
study, who attended preschool at the time and were assessed
again 1 year later, in Grade 1, on reading-related outcome
variables.
Relevant Properties of Greek
This subsection is reproduced from Diamanti et al. (in press).
Greek is a language with rich inflectional and derivational
morphology (see Ralli, 2003) and relatively consistent
orthography (Protopapas and Vlahou, 2009). Nouns and
adjectives are obligatorily inflected for gender, number, and case
via fusional suffixation. For example, the noun χoρóς(/xoros/
“dance”) is composed of the stem χoρ– (/xor/ expressing the
core semantics) and the inflectional suffix – oς(/os/ signifying
masculine singular nominative case). Verb forms also include
a stem and an obligatory inflectional ending, both of which
may be simple or complex. Verbs are inflected for voice, aspect,
tense, number, and person [Ralli, 2003; see Klairis and Babiniotis
(2004) and Holton et al. (2012) for comprehensive descriptions].
For example, the verb χoρε´υω (/xorevo/ “I dance”) is composed
of the same stem χoρ– (/xor/), the derivational affix – ε´υ– (/ev/
forming a verb from a noun), and the inflectional suffix – ω(/o/
signifying first person singular).
Distinct inflectional classes are recognized for both
nouns/adjectives and verbs, each with its own set of suffixation
and stem alternation rules (Ralli, 2003, 2005;Holton et al., 2012).
Word formation in Greek also includes systematic derivational
processes, especially for nouns (based on verb stems) and
adjectives (based on verb and noun stems). Compounding is also
highly productive, as new adjectives, nouns, and verbs can be
created from existing stems and words [see Ralli (2003, 2005) for
more information].
Morphology has extensive orthographic consequences
in Greek, insofar as derivational and grammatical suffixes
are associated with specific spellings, which also serve to
disambiguate homonyms. Knowledge of the inflectional type
is often required for correct spelling of adjective, noun, and
verb suffixes [see Protopapas (2017) for more information and
references]. Therefore, it seems reasonable to hypothesize that
an understanding of morphological processes will be especially
beneficial in learning to spell, and particularly useful in spelling
the inflectional suffixes (Grigorakis and Manolitsis, 2016).
This is important in light of the fact that Greek morphological
spelling is known to be challenging, including both inflectional
and – especially – derivational suffixes (Protopapas et al., 2013a;
Diamanti et al., 2014).
A small amount of instructional activity related to
morphological awareness takes place informally in the
Kindergarten curriculum as part of vocabulary instruction,
in the context of shared book reading and retelling, including
discussion about word types such as diminutive derivation and
number inflection, along with phonological awareness activities
such as letter–sound association and identification. Systematic
decoding is taught in Grade 1, so that most children are able to
read by mid-grade, after which point some instruction related
to morphological awareness appears, for example teaching
the distinct spellings of noun and verb vowel endings (i.e.,
inflectional suffixes).
Most Greek children have mastered the inflectional paradigms
of the language to a large extent by the age of entering
elementary education, at least as far as the suffixes with
orthographic consequences are concerned (i.e., case, gender, and
number, for adjectives and nouns, and person and number,
for verbs). Normally developing kindergarten children approach
ceiling performance in the production of verb past tense
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and noun gender, number, and case (Mastropavlou, 2006)
although persistent difficulties with verb aspectual formation
and noun gender are observed in certain word classes with
unusual properties (Stavrakaki and Clahsen, 2009;Varlokosta
and Nerantzini, 2013, 2015). Thus, morphological acquisition is
largely but not entirely completed by Grade 1.
MATERIALS AND METHODS
Participants
The study sample consisted of 104 children (54 girls and 50
boys) assessed at the middle of kindergarten (February–March;
age M=67.3 months; SD =3.6) and again at the end of
Grade 1 (April–May; about 14 months later). They were native
speakers of Greek and did not have any diagnosed developmental
delay or emotional disorder prohibiting them from enrollment
in typical (general) education settings. They were recruited from
schools in rural (17%), semi-urban (19%), and urban (63%)
areas of four geographically dispersed provinces of Greece,
including a variety of socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds.
Sample demographics represent a close approximation to the
Greek population (77% urban and 23% rural) based on the 2011
census.
Permission to conduct the study in these public schools
was granted by the Ministry of Education following formal
review and approval of the study plan by the Research Office of
the Educational Policy Institute. Parental and school approval,
as well as the child’s oral assent, were obtained prior to test
administration. Participants were not specifically selected; rather,
consent forms were distributed to entire classrooms and children
who returned the signed parental consent were included in the
study.
Materials
Time 1 (predictor) measures included receptive and expressive
vocabulary, and phonological and morphological awareness.
These tasks were administered through an Android application
(app) for mobile devices (tablets) featuring automatic application
of ceiling rules. Time 2 (outcome) measures included word
and pseudoword reading accuracy, text reading fluency and
comprehension, and spelling. The four reading outcome
measures were from “1A1A,” a standardized reading test by
Padeliadu et al. (in press).
Receptive Vocabulary
Four different images were displayed while a recorded spoken
word was played out by the app, and the child was asked
to choose the image that best represented the word that was
heard. The three other images corresponded to a word from
the same semantic category, a phonologically similar word,
and an unrelated word. Words were appropriate for children
in preschool and early elementary grades (including animals,
objects, actions, adjectives, abstract concepts, etc.) and were
presented in order of increasing difficulty (determined by Rasch
analysis of pilot data from 237 children on 65 original items).
Scoring was recorded automatically, amounting to the number
of correct responses. The number of items was N=30 and
the reliability of the scale (Cronbach’s coefficient of internal
consistency) was α=0.88.
Expressive Vocabulary
This was a word definition task, in which each child was
asked to give a brief definition of a series of words. Words
were selected to cover a range of abilities for children in
preschool and early elementary grades, including a variety of
semantic and grammatical categories (animals, food, professions,
objects, actions, abstract concepts, etc.), based on the results
of a pilot study (parallel to that for receptive vocabulary,
with 50 original items). Manual off-line scoring matched other
similar tasks (i.e., WISC vocabulary), such that a proper word
definition received two points, whereas examples of word
use or descriptions were scored with 1 or 0, depending on
word understanding and richness of expression (N=28;
α=0.91).
Phonological Awareness
This was a composite score corresponding to the total number of
items correctly responded to in a series of eight tasks assessing
initial syllable matching (n=7 items; Cronbach’s α=0.84),
initial phoneme matching (n=7; α=0.84), syllable blending
(n=5; α=0.89), phoneme blending (n=7; α=0.93), syllable
segmentation (n=6; α=0.95), phoneme segmentation (n=7;
α=0.95), syllable deletion (n=7; α=0.94), and phoneme
deletion (n=7; α=0.92). For the total scale, as entered in the
analyses, N=53, α=0.97.
In the initial syllable (or phoneme) matching tasks, children
heard the label of a displayed target image and the labels of three
other simultaneously displayed images and had to choose which
of the three images began with the same syllable (phoneme)
as the target image. In the blending tasks, children had to
compose words from a series of syllables (phonemes) that were
heard individually. In the syllable (phoneme) segmentation tasks
children heard a word and were then asked to pronounce
the individual syllables (phonemes) it comprised. Finally, in
the syllable (phoneme) deletion, children were asked to listen
carefully to a word and then to repeat it omitting a specific syllable
(phoneme).
Morphological Awareness
This was a composite score corresponding to the total number of
items correctly responded to in a series of three tasks assessing
judgment (n=8 items; α=0.80) and production (n=11 items;
α=0.73) of inflectional suffixes and production of derivational
suffixes (n=16 items; α=0.94). For the total scale, as entered in
the analyses, N=35, α=0.93. The following description of the
tasks is based on Diamanti et al. (in press).
Inflectional morphemes judgment task
Children saw a picture displaying either one or two turtles
performing an action while listening to two sentences spoken by
two penguin figures displayed next to the action picture. Children
had to choose the sentence matching the picture by pointing at
one of the two penguins after hearing the sentences. Each pair
of sentences contained one pseudoword differing in inflectional
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suffix, which was either singular or plural. For example, given
a picture of two turtles taking photographs, the two sentences
were “the turtles skeni3rd.sg photos” and “the turtles skenoun3rd.pl
photos.” The correct sentence is the second one because the
inflectional suffix of the pseudoverb denotes the plural form and
agrees with the subject, thus matching the picture. Given a picture
of a turtle holding two rulers, the two sentences were “the turtle
is holding theacc.sg serapaacc.sg” and “the turtle is holding theacc.pl
serapesacc.pl” (the critical pseudoword is denoted by italics). The
correct sentence is the second one because the inflectional suffix
of the pseudonoun denotes the plural form and matches the
picture.
Inflectional morphemes production task
Children saw a pair of pictures, illustrating actions performed
by turtles differing in the number of agents or patients of
the depicted action, while listening to a verbal description
including a pseudoword (a pseudoverb in eight sentences,
for the action, and a pseudo-noun in three sentences, for
the object). Children were then provided with the beginning
of a second sentence, matching the second picture, up to
the subject of the verb, and were asked to change the
pseudoword number (from singular to plural or from plural
to singular) accordingly. For example, given a picture of
two turtles with sunglasses and a picture of one turtle with
sunglasses, the sentence and prompt would be “The turtles
menane3rd.pl glasses. The turtle. . .” and the child should say
“menai3rd.sg glasses”; given a picture of a turtle waving at a
monkey and a picture of a turtle waving at two monkeys, the
sentence and prompt would be “The turtle is greeting theacc.sg
reipouacc.sg. The turtle is greeting theacc.pl ” and the child should
say “reipoudesacc.pl” (the critical pseudoword is denoted by
italics).
Derivational morphemes production task
Children saw a picture while listening to a sentence with a critical
word (a different one for each sentence) and the beginning of
a second sentence that was syntactically altered and required
manipulation of a derivational morpheme on the critical word
to be completed correctly (e.g., “The sea deepens. The sea is. . .”
requiring “deep”; “Miriam always teases her friends. Miriam is
a. . .” requiring “teaser” /piraxtiri/, derived from /pirazo/). The
task targeted a variety of derivational morphemes, denoting
property, profession, establishment/institution, material,
collection, comparatives, action, device, nationality/origin,
etc.
Word Reading Accuracy
The word decoding test of the 1A1A decoding subscale was
used, which consists of 57 words two to seven syllables long,
with gradually increasing number of syllables and semantic
complexity and decreasing frequency of occurrence, printed
vertically. Words were nouns, adjectives, passive participles,
and verbs. A stopping criterion of five consecutive errors
was applied. The number of words read correctly was
noted. The internal consistency of the entire “decoding”
factor of 1A1A (which also includes pseudoword decoding,
word/pseudoword discrimination, and word identification) as
reported for elementary grades is high (ω=0.90, H=0.91).
Pseudoword Reading Accuracy
The pseudoword decoding subtest of the 1A1A decoding
subscale was used, which consists of 40 non-words two to six
syllables long, with gradually increasing number of syllables and
phonological complexity, printed vertically. A stopping criterion
of five consecutive errors was applied. The number of non-words
read correctly was noted.
Reading Fluency
A grade-appropriate 247-word passage with an ancient Greek
mythological theme from the reading fluency subscale of 1A1A
was used. Children were asked to read the passage as quickly and
as accurately as they could. The score of the test was the number
of words read correctly within 1 min.
Reading Comprehension
The first three passages from the reading comprehension subscale
of 1A1A were used, which were short and appropriate for the
age of the participants, with gradually increasing semantic and
syntactic difficulty. The first and second passages were narratives,
while the third one was expository. Children had to answer
seven multiple-choice questions for each passage while having
the texts available. The questions required meaning abstraction
based on vocabulary knowledge, as well as literal and inferencing
skills. The score was the total number of questions answered
correctly for all three passages (out of a total of 21 questions).
The internal consistency of the entire “comprehension” factor
of 1A1A (which includes three more passages, for a total of
six) as reported for elementary grades is satisfactory (ω=0.89,
H=0.64).
Spelling
Spelling ability was assessed using a standardized spelling-
to-dictation test (Mouzaki et al., 2010), which includes 60
words dictated in isolation and in a sentence at a child-
determined pace. A stopping criterion of six consecutive errors
was applied. Each word was scored with one point for accurate
spelling.
Procedure
All measures were administered individually by specially trained
research assistants, following a common procedure, in a quiet
room at the children’s kindergarten (Time 1) or school (Time
2). Time 1 (predictor) measures were administered in two to
three sessions of 40–45 min within 2 weeks (in the context of
a variety of other tasks not reported here) using a tablet app
custom made for this purpose. All visual and auditory stimuli
were provided by the app as images and pre-recorded utterances.
Scoring was automated when possible (i.e., evaluation of selection
accuracy), or entered manually after administration when human
judgment was necessary (i.e., evaluation of spoken responses).
Time 2 (outcome) measures were administered individually in
one 40–45-min-long session in the traditional (paper and pencil)
format.
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RESULTS
There were no missing data for this group of participants
(N=104 in all analyses). Visual examination of univariate
quantile–quantile plots and bivariate scatterplots revealed six
extreme outliers (two low values in receptive vocabulary, one low
and one high in fluency, and two high in spelling), which were
replaced by winsorized values at the appropriate percentile (1/N
for single values and 2/Nfor two values) in order to retain a
full data set. Table 1 displays descriptive statistics following this
minor cleanup. Despite some mild deviations from normality,
no extreme values of skew or kurtosis were observed. Table 2
displays the intercorrelations among all variables. Age was not
significantly correlated with morphological awareness (r=0.033,
p=0.740) or with any of the outcome variables (all p>0.11),
probably due to the restricted age range in this sample. Therefore,
age was not entered as a predictor in the regression models.
For each outcome variable, a hierarchical regression analysis
was conducted in three steps: receptive and expressive vocabulary
were entered at the first step, as proxies for language development
and verbal ability in general; phonological awareness was
entered at the second step, and morphological awareness at
the third and final step. This was done in order to quantify
the specific contribution of metalinguistic skills beyond general
language skills, and in particular the specific contribution of
morphological awareness beyond the – already well known –
effect of phonological awareness, which in this way also acts as a
proxy for general metalinguistic skill. Table 3 displays the results
of these analyses, including the total and additional variance
accounted for at each step (rightmost columns), the coefficients
in the final multiple regression models for each outcome variable
including all predictors (leftmost columns), and the proportions
of shared and unique variance accounted for by each predictor in
the final models (commonality analysis; middle columns).
Residual diagnostics are shown in Figure 1, indicating no
severe deviations from normality and no overly influential
data points. There was a significant unique contribution of
morphological awareness, beyond vocabulary and phonological
TABLE 1 | Descriptive statistics for predictor and dependent variables.
Shapiro–Wilks
Variable M M% mdn SD Min Max W p Skewness Kurtosis
Preschool (predictor) variables
Age (months) 67.3 67.0 3.6 56 74 0.965 0.007 −0.22 −0.44
Receptive vocabulary 23.7 79.0 25.0 4.6 10 30 0.902 <0.001 −1.11 0.85
Expressive vocabulary 25.2 90.0 26.5 8.6 3 44 0.986 0.340 −0.33 −0.28
Phonological awareness 26.5 50.0 24.0 10.3 2 51 0.976 0.053 0.34 −0.18
Morphological awareness 20.1 57.4 21.0 7.9 5 34 0.946 <0.001 −0.28 −1.13
Grade 1 (outcome) variables
Word accuracy 38.8 68.1 43.0 13.4 5 57 0.890 <0.001 −0.95 −0.15
Pseudoword accuracy 28.1 70.3 30.0 8.3 5 40 0.910 <0.001 −1.04 0.70
Reading fluency 41.7 39.0 16.3 9 93 0.958 0.002 0.77 1.08
Reading comprehension 14.4 68.5 15.0 3.8 2 21 0.954 0.001 −0.73 0.53
Spelling 15.2 25.3 15.0 5.2 4 29 0.973 0.029 0.44 0.50
M% =mean percent correct; mdn =median; Min and Max refer to the lowest and highest observed value, respectively, after winsorization of outliers (see text).
Shapiro–Wilks test of normality. For all measures, number of participants N =104.
TABLE 2 | Intercorrelations among all variables.
Variable 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Preschool (predictor) variables
(1) Age (months) 0.272 0.179 0.229 0.033 0.031 0.057 0.082 0.148 0.155
(2) Receptive vocabulary 0.420 0.270 0.307 0.160 0.211 0.230 0.440 0.206
(3) Expressive vocabulary 0.251 0.229 0.042 0.103 0.049 0.318 0.039
(4) Phonological awareness 0.472 0.316 0.363 0.409 0.298 0.431
(5) Morphological awareness 0.482 0.473 0.284 0.470 0.392
Grade 1 (outcome) variables
(6) Word accuracy 0.773 0.525 0.392 0.452
(7) Pseudoword accuracy 0.459 0.376 0.423
(8) Reading fluency 0.332 0.693
(9) Reading comprehension 0.360
(10) Spelling
Pearson’s r correlation coefficients; N =104; correlations of 0.193 or greater are significant at p <0.05; and greater than 0.273 at p <0.005.
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Diamanti et al. Preschool Predictors of Early Literacy
awareness, to every outcome variable except fluency, for
which only phonological awareness made a significant unique
contribution. The unique contribution of morphological
awareness was sizeable (9–14% of variance, depending on
outcome measure) and was accompanied by additional,
comparable proportions of variance (9–15%) shared with the
other measures, bringing up the total longitudinal predicted
variance from morphological awareness to more than 20% of
reading (and spelling) outcomes (except fluency).
DISCUSSION
In this longitudinal study we have investigated the prediction
of reading and spelling outcomes near the end of Grade 1
by language and metalinguistic skills assessed in preschool
14 months earlier. Morphological awareness had a significant
unique contribution to all outcome variables except reading
fluency. This finding confirms the important role of
morphological awareness for reading development and extends
it to a younger age than usually studied.
Our results are consistent with the findings of Casalis and
Louis-Alexandre (2000), who studied early reading performance
longitudinally predicted by preschool phonological and
morphological awareness in French, and found both a strong
correlation between phonological and morphological awareness
at these ages as well as longitudinal relationships between both
of them and early reading. Our results are also compatible
with those of Grigorakis and Manolitsis (2016), who examined
the prediction of Grade 1 inflectional spelling by preschool
phonological and morphological awareness in Greek, and
found a significant longitudinal contribution of morphological
awareness beyond phonological awareness and other control
variables.
In particular with respect to spelling, one might expect an
especially important role of morphological awareness in Greek
(Grigorakis and Manolitsis, 2016), because, as noted above, many
inflectional and derivational affixes are associated with specific
spellings (and, indeed, some of them are homophonous and
can only be disambiguated by spelling). This hypothesis cannot
be evaluated in the current study because our strong result
(1R2=0.085, p<0.001) emerged using a standardized spelling
test including many words with difficult stems and not giving
particular weight to grammatical (i.e., inflectional suffix) spelling.
This might be taken to imply that the relationship between
morphological awareness and spelling is not specific to suffixes.
However, our results do not speak to the issue of a suffix-specific
relationship: It may well be the case that morphological awareness
is especially necessary – or beneficial – for spelling inflectional
suffixes, and this could only be discerned in comparison with
TABLE 3 | Results of regression analyses for the longitudinal prediction of Grade 1 reading skills.
Multiple regression Commonality (variance) Hierarchical regression
Preschool predictor βpUnique Common Total Step R21R2p
Word accuracy
Receptive vocabulary 0.018 0.951 <0.001 0.017 0.017 1 0.018 0.410
Expressive vocabulary −0.148 0.336 0.007 −0.005 0.002
Phonological awareness 0.169 0.198 0.013 0.087 0.100 2 0.106 0.089 0.002
Morphological awareness 0.748 <0.001 0.144 0.088 0.232 3 0.250 0.144 <0.001
Pseudoword accuracy
Receptive vocabulary 0.047 0.794 0.001 0.029 0.030 1 0.031 0.207
Expressive vocabulary −0.042 0.659 0.002 0.009 0.011
Phonological awareness 0.147 0.071 0.025 0.107 0.132 2 0.138 0.108 0.001
Morphological awareness 0.409 <0.001 0.112 0.112 0.224 3 0.251 0.112 <0.001
Fluency
Receptive vocabulary 0.663 0.065 0.027 0.055 0.081 1 0.081 0.014
Expressive vocabulary −0.174 0.354 0.007 0.005 0.012
Phonological awareness 0.527 0.001 0.084 0.108 0.192 2 0.227 0.146 <0.001
Morphological awareness 0.333 0.115 0.019 0.106 0.125 3 0.247 0.019 0.115
Comprehension
Receptive vocabulary 0.215 0.007 0.052 0.127 0.179 1 0.202 <0.001
Expressive vocabulary 0.052 0.208 0.011 0.090 0.101
Phonological awareness 0.012 0.731 0.001 0.088 0.089 2 0.231 0.029 0.056
Morphological awareness 0.168 <0.001 0.091 0.130 0.221 3 0.322 0.091 <0.001
Spelling
Receptive vocabulary 0.170 0.115 0.017 0.057 0.074 1 0.075 0.019
Expressive vocabulary −0.079 0.163 0.014 −0.007 0.007
Phonological awareness 0.143 0.003 0.061 0.144 0.206 2 0.240 0.165 <0.001
Morphological awareness 0.223 0.001 0.085 0.153 0.238 3 0.325 0.085 0.001
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Diamanti et al. Preschool Predictors of Early Literacy
appropriately designed spelling tests assessing performance on
particular kinds of suffixes. Such studies should be performed
with older children, because suffix-specific spelling knowledge is
taught after Grade 1. At any rate, our findings suggest that there is
also a more general sense in which early metalinguistic awareness
supports the development of spelling skill. Whether this relates
to language or cognitive skills required for metalinguistic task
performance is not known. Future studies must use appropriate
latent constructs to examine whether these observed longitudinal
relationships are direct or mediated by other, more general,
constructs.
Our findings seem to be somewhat at odds with those of
Manolitsis (2006), who found that preschool morphological
awareness longitudinally predicted Grade 1 single word reading
speed, but not accuracy, after controlling for phonological
awareness. We have not measured single word reading speed, so
this finding is not directly comparable to our measure of text
reading fluency. The difference in the longitudinal prediction
of word reading accuracy is difficult to explain conclusively
without more information; it may be attributable to differences
in the task content or task reliabilities. In particular, two of the
morphological awareness tests used by Manolitsis had internal
reliabilities less than 0.70, whereas the third one was a compound
inversion task, unlike the ones we used here. Despite these
differences, Manolitsis also found largely shared longitudinal
contributions from preschool phonological and morphological
awareness to Grade 1 word reading. In other words his general
pattern of findings was not inconsistent with ours.
Vocabulary made a significant unique contribution only in
the prediction of reading comprehension, and this was largely
accounted for by the receptive (picture selection) rather than the
expressive (verbal definitions) measure. This finding is consistent
with the role of vocabulary in the development of reading
comprehension that has been revealed in middle elementary
grades in Greek (Protopapas et al., 2007, 2013b). Vocabulary
was not related to Grade 1 reading accuracy performance, even
when entered in the first step of the regression. In contrast,
its significant Step 1 contribution to fluency and spelling was
eventually trumped by morphological awareness due to shared
variance related to these outcomes. This suggests that these
morphological awareness tests capture language skills variance
that is relevant for reading development at this age (cf. Hjetland
et al., submitted).
It has long been known that phonological and morphological
awareness share much of their variance at this age (e.g., Carlisle
and Nomanbhoy, 1993) and thus it is no surprise that their
contribution to reading performance is largely shared (e.g.,
Manolitsis, 2006). In our study, phonological awareness made
a significant contribution to all reading outcomes (marginal
for comprehension) when entered after vocabulary, as expected.
However, this was only significant for fluency and spelling, in
which it included a substantial unique contribution (6–8%). In
contrast, the contribution of phonological awareness to word and
pseudoword accuracy and reading comprehension was largely
shared with morphological awareness, ending up non-significant
in the final multiple regression models. In particular, the unique
contribution of phonological awareness to word and pseudoword
reading accuracy, in the presence of morphological awareness,
was less than 3% of the variance. One way to interpret this, going
beyond any shared content between materials in phonological
and morphological awareness tasks, is to consider the extent
to which these morphological awareness tests may also capture
more general metalinguistic skill variance that is relevant for
learning to read.
This finding raises the interesting possibility that the
predictive power of phonological awareness for reading
development may not be entirely due to its phonological nature
but perhaps in part because it concerns metalinguistic skill,
which, in turn, depends on earlier language skill development.
It will be necessary to examine whether this finding holds up in
follow-up research, in Greek and other languages, and in a wider
range of ages. One reason it has not been found in the few studies
that have examined the longitudinal prediction of early reading
outcomes by preschool skills may have to do with psychometric
issues. Specifically, tests of morphological awareness tend to be
of lower reliability than tests of phonological awareness, and
FIGURE 1 | Multiple regression diagnostics. (Top) Quantile–quantile plots of standardized residuals for the longitudinal prediction of each outcome variable.
(Bottom) Corresponding leverage-residual plots with overlaid smooth trend, also displaying Cook’s distance curves at values of 0.2 and 0.3.
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Diamanti et al. Preschool Predictors of Early Literacy
therefore may not pick up all the variance that can properly be
attributed to a well-defined morphological awareness construct
due to measurement noise. Our study stands out for the very high
reliability of both the phonological and morphological awareness
measures, allowing the regression models to capture substantial
proportions of the reliable variance in the dependent variables.
Ideally, future studies should include multiple highly reliable
tasks as indices of corresponding latent constructs in order to
examine the relative contribution of different metalinguistic skills
to early reading outcomes as free from measurement noise as
possible.
In this work we have treated phonological and morphological
awareness as unitary constructs, by combining responses from
multiple subtasks examining specific aspects of these domains.
This methodological choice is supported by the very high
reliability of the aggregated tasks. It is also supported by
strong evidence in favor of phonological awareness being a
unidimensional construct (e.g., Schatschneider et al., 1999;
Anthony and Lonigan, 2004; also in Greek: Papadopoulos et al.,
2009, 2012). Similarly, with respect to the morphological tasks,
covering both inflectional and derivational morphology, and
both judgment and production tasks, Diamanti et al. (in press)
found that a single factor sufficed and accounted for 59% of the
total variance, consistent with a unidimensional construct for
morphological awareness as well [Muse (2005) as cited in Tighe
and Schatschneider (2015)].
Our study joins the long list of studies, mentioned in
the introduction, in suggesting that an explicit understanding
of linguistic structure is substantially predictive of future
reading performance. It provides an important confirmation
of the importance of morphological awareness for reading
development, by testing preliterate children, for whom a
reverse effect (of reading experience on the development of
morphological awareness) is unlikely, and by employing highly
reliable tests covering different aspects of the target construct,
such as a variety of suffixes and functions and tasks of different
formats and demands. In addition, our findings bring out
differences in the relevance of phonological and morphological
awareness for the prediction of different reading (and spelling)
tasks, at least for the age tested, that is, beginner readers.
Finally, the present study raises the intriguing possibility that
the general cognitive demands of metalinguistic tasks may be of
utmost importance for the prediction of reading development,
whereas the linguistic content of the tasks may be of secondary
importance or critical for specific associations with particular
reading skills. Given the increasing prominence of morphological
awareness study in the reading literature, we expect that this issue
will be further investigated and clarified in future comprehensive
studies.
ETHICS STATEMENT
This study was carried out in accordance with the guidelines of
the American Psychological Association for treatment of human
participants, with written informed consent obtained from the
parents (or legal guardians) of all children participants, approval
by the school authorities, and oral assent of the children prior
to test administration. The protocol was approved by the Greek
Ministry of Education, following positive recommendation of the
Institute of Educational Policy.
AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS
VD conceptualized this study. VD, AM, AR, FA, and SP
contributed to the design and implementation of data collection.
AP conducted the statistical analysis of the data. VD and
AP drafted the manuscript. All authors have contributed to
the writing and revising of the manuscript and agree to be
accountable for the content of the work.
FUNDING
This research was supported in part by a postdoctoral
research fellowship to VD in the context of research program
“The Foundation of Reading and Writing in a Transparent
Orthography: Oral Language Development and Early Literacy
Skills” funded by the University of Crete Special Account, PI: AM.
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Conflict of Interest Statement: The preschool measures reported here form part
of a commercially available screening battery (Logometro, produced by Inte∗Learn
Multimedia Educational Applications) designed by the authors, who receive part
of the proceeds from its use.
Copyright © 2017 Diamanti, Mouzaki, Ralli, Antoniou, Papaioannou and
Protopapas. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative
Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in
other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited
and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted
academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not
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Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 12 November 2017 | Volume 8 | Article 2039