Phonological and morphological awareness in first graders

ABSTRACTPhonological awareness is thought to be related to children's success in learning to read because it indicates an awareness of the internal structure of words. Morphological awareness, which has been found to be related to reading achievement for older students, may offer a more comprehensive measure of linguistic sensitivity because it entails not only phonological awareness, but also other aspects of linguistic knowledge. The research study reported herein was designed to investigate the extent to which phonological awareness contributes to the morphological awareness of first graders and to determine the extent to which phonological and morphological awareness account for variance in word reading. Two tasks of morphological awareness were used, one assessing judgments of morphological relations and the other assessing the production of inflected and derived forms.