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PreschoolPhonologicalandMorphologicalAwarenessAsLongitudinalPredictorsofEarlyReadingandSpellingDevelopmentin....

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ORIGINAL RESEARCHpublished: 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, CanadaBarbara T. Conboy,

University of Washington,United States

*Correspondence:Vassiliki Diamanti

vasiliki.diamanti@isp.uio.no

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Language Sciences,a section of the journalFrontiers in Psychology

Received: 27 June 2017Accepted: 07 November 2017Published: 27 November 2017

Citation:Diamanti V, Mouzaki A, Ralli A,

Antoniou F, Papaioannou S andProtopapas A (2017) PreschoolPhonological and Morphological

Awareness As Longitudinal Predictorsof Early Reading and Spelling

Development in Greek.Front. Psychol. 8:2039.

doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02039

Preschool Phonological andMorphological Awareness AsLongitudinal Predictors of EarlyReading and Spelling Developmentin GreekVassiliki Diamanti1,2* , Angeliki Mouzaki1, Asimina Ralli3, Faye Antoniou3,Sofia Papaioannou4 and Athanassios Protopapas2

1 Department of Primary Education, University of Crete, Rethymno, Greece, 2 Department of Special Needs Education,University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway, 3 Department of Philosophy, Pedagogy, and Psychology, National and KapodistrianUniversity of Athens, Athens, Greece, 4 Department of Medicine, University of Crete, Rethymno, Greece

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

Keywords: morphological awareness, phonological awareness, reading, spelling, longitudinal study

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INTRODUCTION

Reading and spelling are considerable cognitive undertakingsthat require the integration of written and spoken language. Anoverwhelming body of research evidence suggests that children’sphonological awareness, which requires conscious reflectionupon and explicit manipulation of the constituent speech soundsof language, is a necessary requirement for the acquisition of thealphabetic principle (Byrne, 1996) and a key skill for masteringdecoding (National Reading Panel, 2000; Lonigan et al., 2009)and spelling across orthographies (Cataldo and Ellis, 1988; Ellisand 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 andSamuelsson, 2010).

On the other hand, morphological awareness plays afundamental role in mastering decoding, reading fluency, andcomprehension (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 (Deaconand Kirby, 2004; Deacon and Bryant, 2005, 2006; Desrocherset al., 2017) across orthographies (Wei et al., 2014; Rothou andPadeliadu, 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 understandingof morphological relations between word forms and meanings,such as grammatical inflection and productive derivation, and(b) the ability to manipulate the morphological structure ofwords (Carlisle, 1995). The present study aimed to examine thepredictive value of preschool morphological and phonologicalawareness in learning to read and spell.

Morphological Awareness and LiteracyDevelopmentIt has been forcefully argued that reading comprehensioncannot succeed unless the reader appreciates morphologicalword formation, that is, how differences in word forms relateto differences in meaning (Carlisle, 2003). This suggests thatan explicit understanding of morphological relations, termedmorphological awareness, is a prerequisite to skilled reading.In fact morphological awareness is related not only to readingcomprehension, 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 contributionof morphological awareness to spelling is robust to a multitude ofcontrol variables (Deacon et al., 2009) and includes both inflectedand derived forms (Deacon et al., 2010) beyond the spelling ofspecific morphemes (Casalis et al., 2011).

Deacon and Kirby (2004) examined the role of bothphonological and morphological awareness in learning to readfor English-speaking Canadian children. They investigated thelongitudinal prediction of Grades 3, 4, and 5 pseudowordreading, single word reading, and reading comprehension fromGrade 2 phonological and morphological awareness. Theyfound that morphological awareness made a small but unique

contribution to all aspects of reading development – mainlypseudoword reading and reading comprehension – during the3 years of middle elementary school, over and beyond theeffect of phonological awareness. They argued that morphologicalawareness might have accounted for more variance in the readingvariables if multiple measures of various formats and tappinga broader range of derivations and inflections had been used.The present study addressed this methodological limitation byassessing children in an elaborate and systematic battery ofphonological and morphological awareness tasks.

In another study of English-speaking Canadian children,Deacon et al. (2009) examined the predictive value ofmorphological awareness, assessed in the early school years, forthe prediction of spelling, assessed in middle elementary grades.They reported that Grade 2 morphological awareness accountedfor approximately 8% of the variance in Grade 4 general spellingskills, 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 morphologicalawareness assessed before the onset of formal reading instruction.Casalis and Louis-Alexandre (2000) studied the longitudinalcontribution of phonological and morphological awareness todecoding and reading comprehension. They assessed French-speaking kindergarten children in a variety of morphologicalawareness tasks measuring both inflectional and derivationalmorphology. Their findings showed strong correlations betweenphonological and morphological awareness tasks, as well asunique contributions of both skills to Grade 2 decoding skillsand reading comprehension. However, they only analyzed thecorrelations for individual tasks and did not examine the overalleffects of morphological and phonological awareness skills byconsidering all the corresponding tasks together. Therefore,the total magnitude of the longitudinal relationship remainedunknown.

More recently, using latent variable modeling in Chinese, Panet al. (2016) found that pre-literate syllable and morphologicalawareness predicted character reading, reading fluency, readingcomprehension, and writing at the age of 11 years, beyond anyeffects of phonological awareness, but only indirectly, that is,through post-literate morphological awareness assessed at theages of 7–10 years.

The longitudinal relation between early morphologicalawareness and reading and spelling skills has also been studiedin Greek. Manolitsis (2006) found that morphological awareness,assessed in kindergarten, longitudinally predicted Grade 1 wordreading but its contribution to accuracy was not significantwhen kindergarten phonological awareness was controlled for.Pittas and Nunes (2014) assessed first and third graders in threemorphological awareness tasks: a pseudoword inflection task,a sentence analogy task, and a morphological relatedness task.They found a unique contribution of morphological awareness toreading – but not to spelling – assessed 8 months later, even afterpartialling out the effects of grade, verbal ability, phonologicalawareness, and initial reading level.

Grigorakis and Manolitsis (2016) examined the longitudinalprediction of Greek morphological spelling from morphological

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awareness measured before and at the beginning of formalliteracy instruction. They assessed 229 kindergarten children5–6 years old on a variety of morphological awareness tasksmeasuring their ability to recognize and manipulate inflections,derivations, and compound words. Spelling of inflectionalsuffixes in words and pseudowords was assessed at Grades 1and 2. Morphological awareness was a significant longitudinalpredictor of word spelling, surviving control for verbal andnon-verbal intelligence, verbal short-term memory, receptiveand expressive vocabulary, letter sound knowledge, RAN, andphonological awareness.

Finally, in a cross-linguistic study comparing English, French,and Greek, Desrochers et al. (2017) found that Greek children’smorphological awareness skills at the beginning of Grade 2 wereunique predictors of reading comprehension and spelling, but notof reading accuracy – as in English – and fluency – as in bothEnglish and French – at the end of the same grade.

Evidence for the importance of morphological awareness hasalso been provided by intervention studies. If morphologicalawareness forms a critical substrate for reading development,then training in morphological awareness, if successful, shouldlead to measurable improvements in reading performance. Dueto their experimental – rather than correlational – nature, studiesof morphological awareness training constitute an empiricallycrucial source of evidence regarding the connection betweenmorphological awareness and literacy. Indeed, instructionin morphological awareness has been shown to result inbenefits across literacy domains, especially when combined withphonological awareness training (e.g., Lyster, 2002; Lyster et al.,2016; Manolitsis, 2017; see meta-analyses and systematic reviewsin Reed, 2008; Bowers et al., 2010; Carlisle, 2010; Goodwin andAhn, 2010, 2013).

However, even though dozens of morphological awarenessstudies have accumulated to date, as seen in the aforementionedreviews, a confident conclusion remains unwarranted becauseit has been challenging to establish the specificity of training.The majority of studies have failed to employ an active controlgroup receiving instruction of similar structure and intensitybut non-morphological in content. Indeed, many studies havesimply compared the experimental group to a passive controlgroup not receiving any special instruction but following theregular classroom program. When active control groups areemployed the benefits to literacy from morphological training arenot significantly stronger (e.g., comparing against phonologicalawareness training; Lyster, 2002; Lyster et al., 2016).

An additional difficulty with the theoretical interpretation ofthe majority of these training studies is that they have relied,at least in part, on printed materials or strategies potentiallyexploiting the orthographic knowledge of participants, therebyobscuring the origin of the observed effects. That is, althoughthe focus of the instruction was on the morphological aspects ofwords, if training took place using written words then childrenmay have exhibited literacy gains due to the fact that theyreceived a form of reading or spelling instruction rather than tomorphological awareness per se.

In sum, despite the recent surge in interest in the relationshipbetween morphological awareness and reading skill development,

and the strong evidence for its importance, the relevant literaturehas not conclusively established the precedence, or necessity,of morphological awareness for reading development and forparticular reading skills. Many studies have examined concurrentcorrelations and most have assessed children in elementarygrades, for which reciprocal effects may have contributed tothe reported findings. That is, if morphological awareness isassessed after the onset of reading instruction, it is possiblethat exposure to the various printed word types may havecontributed to the further development of morphologicalawareness. Therefore, a finding of robust correlations mayconceivably be due to an inverse direction of causation thantypically hypothesized.

Although longitudinal studies are one step toward addressingthis shortcoming, it is also critical that the first assessmentof morphological awareness takes place before the onset ofreading instruction, to minimize effects of exposure to print. Thisrequires the development and validation of appropriate testingmaterials for preschoolers that arguably address metalinguisticmorphological skills. In the present study we have thus examinedthe longitudinal prediction of early (Grade 1) reading skills bypreschool morphological awareness, controlling for phonologicalawareness and vocabulary. To obtain a more nearly completepicture of the importance of morphological awareness for readingskill development, we have applied a comprehensive battery ofreading outcomes, including word and pseudoword accuracy,reading fluency, reading comprehension, as well as spelling.

Development and Assessment ofMorphological AwarenessTypical language development involves unconscious use ofmorphology. Very young children produce overgeneralizations,such as “buyed” (instead of “bought”). The production ofthese errors suggests a gradual development in understandingthe rules of inflectional morphology (Berko, 1958; Selby,1972). Nonetheless, the boundary between tacit knowledge ofmorphological processes and conscious morphological awarenesshas not been sufficiently investigated. In many cases it is not clearwhether differences in measures of morphological awarenessreflect differences in metalinguistic awareness or in implicitmorphological knowledge (Nagy et al., 2014). Metalinguisticawareness is thought to be a special kind of linguisticfunctioning, beyond language acquisition, which develops inmiddle childhood (Tunmer et al., 1984).

The morphological processes of grammatical inflection andproductive derivation seem to follow a similar but non-simultaneous developmental progression. Evidence shows thatawareness of inflectional morphology is acquired in the firstschool years (Diakogiorgi et al., 2005; Kuo and Anderson, 2006),whereas awareness of derivational morphology develops towardthe fourth year (Anglin, 1993; Carlisle, 2000), and continues togrow throughout the school years (Berko, 1958; Anglin, 1993;Berninger et al., 2010). Carlisle (1995) suggested that children’sawareness of derivational morphology makes a transition froman implicit to an explicit level at the ages of kindergarten and firstgrade.

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Morphological awareness tasks have been classified accordingto their cognitive and meta-cognitive requirements, which mayoperate at either an implicit or an explicit level (Deacon et al.,2008). Lexical judgment tasks, which require children to decidewhether two words are related or not, have been widely usedto assess implicit morphological skills (e.g., Mahony et al., 2000;Duncan et al., 2009), whereas analogy and production tasks havebeen used to tap explicit skills (e.g., Berko, 1958; Derwing, 1976;Nunes et al., 1997; Carlisle, 2000; Kirby et al., 2012). Productiontasks have also been differentiated between implicit and explicit(Casalis and Louis-Alexandre, 2000).

Diamanti et al. (in press) recently examined the developmentof morphological awareness in Greek children 4–7 years old.They compared the domains of inflectional and derivationalmorphology, adopting a distinction between two levels, namelyepilinguistic control and metalinguistic awareness. Epilinguisticcontrol refers to an intermediate level of elementary awarenessthat has been posited to intervene developmentally betweenthe acquisition of the linguistic skill and the acquisitionof metalinguistic awareness (Gombert, 1992). In contrast,metalinguistic awareness refers to the individual’s ability to reflectupon and consciously manipulate morphemes, as well as theability to deliberately apply word formation rules. FollowingCarlisle (1995), epilinguistic control is evidenced in judgmenttasks, whereas full-blown metalinguistic awareness is evidencedin production tasks (see Diamanti et al., in press, for furtherdiscussion). In addition to the expected performance increasewith age, Diamanti et al. (in press) found that a single factorsufficed and accounted for 0.59 of the variance in the fourtasks, consistent with a common developmental path underlyingboth domains and both levels of morphological awareness. Incomparison of the developmental growth curves among tasks,they found that production of derivational morphemes wasmore difficult than production of inflectional morphemes andjudgment of derivational morphemes, whereas the differencesbetween the two inflectional tasks and between the two judgmenttasks were not significant.

Given these findings, Diamanti et al. (in press) suggested thatat these ages epilinguistic control is similarly effective for the twomorphological domains whereas full metalinguistic awarenessof derivational morphology trails behind that of inflectionalmorphology, at least as measured by these specific tasks. Thus, onthe one hand, this study highlighted the need for early trackingand distinctions among levels and domains of morphologicalawareness. On the other hand, it demonstrated the reliabilityand validity of the materials used and the potential of thiscombination of subscales to form a reliable and coherent scalefor overall wide-range assessment of morphological awarenessin the preschool and early elementary school age range. Thepresent study is a follow-up of a subset of the children in thatstudy, who attended preschool at the time and were assessedagain 1 year later, in Grade 1, on reading-related outcomevariables.

Relevant Properties of GreekThis subsection is reproduced from Diamanti et al. (in press).Greek is a language with rich inflectional and derivational

morphology (see Ralli, 2003) and relatively consistentorthography (Protopapas and Vlahou, 2009). Nouns andadjectives are obligatorily inflected for gender, number, and casevia fusional suffixation. For example, the noun χoρóς (/xoros/“dance”) is composed of the stem χoρ – (/xor/ expressing thecore semantics) and the inflectional suffix – oς (/os/ signifyingmasculine singular nominative case). Verb forms also includea stem and an obligatory inflectional ending, both of whichmay 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 χoρευω (/xorevo/ “I dance”) is composedof the same stem χoρ – (/xor/), the derivational affix – ευ – (/ev/forming a verb from a noun), and the inflectional suffix – ω (/o/signifying first person singular).

Distinct inflectional classes are recognized for bothnouns/adjectives and verbs, each with its own set of suffixationand stem alternation rules (Ralli, 2003, 2005; Holton et al., 2012).Word formation in Greek also includes systematic derivationalprocesses, especially for nouns (based on verb stems) andadjectives (based on verb and noun stems). Compounding is alsohighly productive, as new adjectives, nouns, and verbs can becreated from existing stems and words [see Ralli (2003, 2005) formore information].

Morphology has extensive orthographic consequencesin Greek, insofar as derivational and grammatical suffixesare associated with specific spellings, which also serve todisambiguate homonyms. Knowledge of the inflectional typeis often required for correct spelling of adjective, noun, andverb suffixes [see Protopapas (2017) for more information andreferences]. Therefore, it seems reasonable to hypothesize thatan understanding of morphological processes will be especiallybeneficial in learning to spell, and particularly useful in spellingthe inflectional suffixes (Grigorakis and Manolitsis, 2016).This is important in light of the fact that Greek morphologicalspelling is known to be challenging, including both inflectionaland – especially – derivational suffixes (Protopapas et al., 2013a;Diamanti et al., 2014).

A small amount of instructional activity related tomorphological awareness takes place informally in theKindergarten curriculum as part of vocabulary instruction,in the context of shared book reading and retelling, includingdiscussion about word types such as diminutive derivation andnumber inflection, along with phonological awareness activitiessuch as letter–sound association and identification. Systematicdecoding is taught in Grade 1, so that most children are able toread by mid-grade, after which point some instruction relatedto morphological awareness appears, for example teachingthe distinct spellings of noun and verb vowel endings (i.e.,inflectional suffixes).

Most Greek children have mastered the inflectional paradigmsof the language to a large extent by the age of enteringelementary education, at least as far as the suffixes withorthographic consequences are concerned (i.e., case, gender, andnumber, for adjectives and nouns, and person and number,for verbs). Normally developing kindergarten children approachceiling 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 formationand noun gender are observed in certain word classes withunusual properties (Stavrakaki and Clahsen, 2009; Varlokostaand Nerantzini, 2013, 2015). Thus, morphological acquisition islargely but not entirely completed by Grade 1.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

ParticipantsThe study sample consisted of 104 children (54 girls and 50boys) assessed at the middle of kindergarten (February–March;age M = 67.3 months; SD = 3.6) and again at the end ofGrade 1 (April–May; about 14 months later). They were nativespeakers of Greek and did not have any diagnosed developmentaldelay or emotional disorder prohibiting them from enrollmentin typical (general) education settings. They were recruited fromschools 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 theGreek population (77% urban and 23% rural) based on the 2011census.

Permission to conduct the study in these public schoolswas granted by the Ministry of Education following formalreview and approval of the study plan by the Research Office ofthe Educational Policy Institute. Parental and school approval,as well as the child’s oral assent, were obtained prior to testadministration. Participants were not specifically selected; rather,consent forms were distributed to entire classrooms and childrenwho returned the signed parental consent were included in thestudy.

MaterialsTime 1 (predictor) measures included receptive and expressivevocabulary, and phonological and morphological awareness.These tasks were administered through an Android application(app) for mobile devices (tablets) featuring automatic applicationof ceiling rules. Time 2 (outcome) measures included wordand pseudoword reading accuracy, text reading fluency andcomprehension, and spelling. The four reading outcomemeasures were from “1A1A,” a standardized reading test byPadeliadu et al. (in press).

Receptive VocabularyFour different images were displayed while a recorded spokenword was played out by the app, and the child was askedto choose the image that best represented the word that washeard. The three other images corresponded to a word fromthe same semantic category, a phonologically similar word,and an unrelated word. Words were appropriate for childrenin preschool and early elementary grades (including animals,objects, actions, adjectives, abstract concepts, etc.) and werepresented in order of increasing difficulty (determined by Raschanalysis 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 andthe reliability of the scale (Cronbach’s coefficient of internalconsistency) was α= 0.88.

Expressive VocabularyThis was a word definition task, in which each child wasasked to give a brief definition of a series of words. Wordswere selected to cover a range of abilities for children inpreschool and early elementary grades, including a variety ofsemantic and grammatical categories (animals, food, professions,objects, actions, abstract concepts, etc.), based on the resultsof a pilot study (parallel to that for receptive vocabulary,with 50 original items). Manual off-line scoring matched othersimilar tasks (i.e., WISC vocabulary), such that a proper worddefinition received two points, whereas examples of worduse or descriptions were scored with 1 or 0, depending onword understanding and richness of expression (N = 28;α= 0.91).

Phonological AwarenessThis was a composite score corresponding to the total number ofitems correctly responded to in a series of eight tasks assessinginitial 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), syllablesegmentation (n = 6; α = 0.95), phoneme segmentation (n = 7;α = 0.95), syllable deletion (n = 7; α = 0.94), and phonemedeletion (n = 7; α = 0.92). For the total scale, as entered in theanalyses, N = 53, α= 0.97.

In the initial syllable (or phoneme) matching tasks, childrenheard the label of a displayed target image and the labels of threeother simultaneously displayed images and had to choose whichof the three images began with the same syllable (phoneme)as the target image. In the blending tasks, children had tocompose words from a series of syllables (phonemes) that wereheard individually. In the syllable (phoneme) segmentation taskschildren heard a word and were then asked to pronouncethe individual syllables (phonemes) it comprised. Finally, inthe syllable (phoneme) deletion, children were asked to listencarefully to a word and then to repeat it omitting a specific syllable(phoneme).

Morphological AwarenessThis was a composite score corresponding to the total number ofitems correctly responded to in a series of three tasks assessingjudgment (n = 8 items; α = 0.80) and production (n = 11 items;α = 0.73) of inflectional suffixes and production of derivationalsuffixes (n= 16 items; α= 0.94). For the total scale, as entered inthe analyses, N = 35, α = 0.93. The following description of thetasks is based on Diamanti et al. (in press).

Inflectional morphemes judgment taskChildren saw a picture displaying either one or two turtlesperforming an action while listening to two sentences spoken bytwo penguin figures displayed next to the action picture. Childrenhad to choose the sentence matching the picture by pointing atone of the two penguins after hearing the sentences. Each pairof sentences contained one pseudoword differing in inflectional

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suffix, which was either singular or plural. For example, givena picture of two turtles taking photographs, the two sentenceswere “the turtles skeni3rd.sg photos” and “the turtles skenoun3rd.plphotos.” The correct sentence is the second one because theinflectional suffix of the pseudoverb denotes the plural form andagrees with the subject, thus matching the picture. Given a pictureof a turtle holding two rulers, the two sentences were “the turtleis holding theacc.sg serapaacc.sg” and “the turtle is holding theacc.plserapesacc.pl” (the critical pseudoword is denoted by italics). Thecorrect sentence is the second one because the inflectional suffixof the pseudonoun denotes the plural form and matches thepicture.

Inflectional morphemes production taskChildren saw a pair of pictures, illustrating actions performedby turtles differing in the number of agents or patients ofthe depicted action, while listening to a verbal descriptionincluding a pseudoword (a pseudoverb in eight sentences,for the action, and a pseudo-noun in three sentences, forthe object). Children were then provided with the beginningof a second sentence, matching the second picture, up tothe subject of the verb, and were asked to change thepseudoword number (from singular to plural or from pluralto singular) accordingly. For example, given a picture oftwo turtles with sunglasses and a picture of one turtle withsunglasses, the sentence and prompt would be “The turtlesmenane3rd.pl glasses. The turtle. . .” and the child should say“menai3rd.sg glasses”; given a picture of a turtle waving at amonkey and a picture of a turtle waving at two monkeys, thesentence and prompt would be “The turtle is greeting theacc.sgreipouacc.sg. The turtle is greeting theacc.pl” and the child shouldsay “reipoudesacc.pl” (the critical pseudoword is denoted byitalics).

Derivational morphemes production taskChildren saw a picture while listening to a sentence with a criticalword (a different one for each sentence) and the beginning ofa second sentence that was syntactically altered and requiredmanipulation of a derivational morpheme on the critical wordto be completed correctly (e.g., “The sea deepens. The sea is. . .”requiring “deep”; “Miriam always teases her friends. Miriam isa. . .” requiring “teaser” /piraxtiri/, derived from /pirazo/). Thetask targeted a variety of derivational morphemes, denotingproperty, profession, establishment/institution, material,collection, comparatives, action, device, nationality/origin,etc.

Word Reading AccuracyThe word decoding test of the 1A1A decoding subscale wasused, which consists of 57 words two to seven syllables long,with gradually increasing number of syllables and semanticcomplexity and decreasing frequency of occurrence, printedvertically. Words were nouns, adjectives, passive participles,and verbs. A stopping criterion of five consecutive errorswas applied. The number of words read correctly wasnoted. The internal consistency of the entire “decoding”factor of 1A1A (which also includes pseudoword decoding,

word/pseudoword discrimination, and word identification) asreported for elementary grades is high (ω= 0.90, H = 0.91).

Pseudoword Reading AccuracyThe pseudoword decoding subtest of the 1A1A decodingsubscale was used, which consists of 40 non-words two to sixsyllables long, with gradually increasing number of syllables andphonological complexity, printed vertically. A stopping criterionof five consecutive errors was applied. The number of non-wordsread correctly was noted.

Reading FluencyA grade-appropriate 247-word passage with an ancient Greekmythological theme from the reading fluency subscale of1A1Awas used. Children were asked to read the passage as quickly andas accurately as they could. The score of the test was the numberof words read correctly within 1 min.

Reading ComprehensionThe first three passages from the reading comprehension subscaleof 1A1A were used, which were short and appropriate for theage of the participants, with gradually increasing semantic andsyntactic difficulty. The first and second passages were narratives,while the third one was expository. Children had to answerseven multiple-choice questions for each passage while havingthe texts available. The questions required meaning abstractionbased on vocabulary knowledge, as well as literal and inferencingskills. The score was the total number of questions answeredcorrectly for all three passages (out of a total of 21 questions).The internal consistency of the entire “comprehension” factorof 1A1A (which includes three more passages, for a total ofsix) as reported for elementary grades is satisfactory (ω = 0.89,H = 0.64).

SpellingSpelling ability was assessed using a standardized spelling-to-dictation test (Mouzaki et al., 2010), which includes 60words dictated in isolation and in a sentence at a child-determined pace. A stopping criterion of six consecutive errorswas applied. Each word was scored with one point for accuratespelling.

ProcedureAll measures were administered individually by specially trainedresearch assistants, following a common procedure, in a quietroom at the children’s kindergarten (Time 1) or school (Time2). Time 1 (predictor) measures were administered in two tothree sessions of 40–45 min within 2 weeks (in the context ofa variety of other tasks not reported here) using a tablet appcustom made for this purpose. All visual and auditory stimuliwere provided by the app as images and pre-recorded utterances.Scoring was automated when possible (i.e., evaluation of selectionaccuracy), or entered manually after administration when humanjudgment was necessary (i.e., evaluation of spoken responses).Time 2 (outcome) measures were administered individually inone 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 univariatequantile–quantile plots and bivariate scatterplots revealed sixextreme outliers (two low values in receptive vocabulary, one lowand one high in fluency, and two high in spelling), which werereplaced by winsorized values at the appropriate percentile (1/Nfor single values and 2/N for two values) in order to retain afull data set. Table 1 displays descriptive statistics following thisminor cleanup. Despite some mild deviations from normality,no extreme values of skew or kurtosis were observed. Table 2displays the intercorrelations among all variables. Age was notsignificantly 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 analysiswas conducted in three steps: receptive and expressive vocabulary

were entered at the first step, as proxies for language developmentand verbal ability in general; phonological awareness wasentered at the second step, and morphological awareness atthe third and final step. This was done in order to quantifythe specific contribution of metalinguistic skills beyond generallanguage skills, and in particular the specific contribution ofmorphological awareness beyond the – already well known –effect of phonological awareness, which in this way also acts as aproxy for general metalinguistic skill. Table 3 displays the resultsof these analyses, including the total and additional varianceaccounted for at each step (rightmost columns), the coefficientsin the final multiple regression models for each outcome variableincluding all predictors (leftmost columns), and the proportionsof shared and unique variance accounted for by each predictor inthe final models (commonality analysis; middle columns).

Residual diagnostics are shown in Figure 1, indicating nosevere deviations from normality and no overly influentialdata points. There was a significant unique contribution ofmorphological 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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awareness, to every outcome variable except fluency, forwhich only phonological awareness made a significant uniquecontribution. The unique contribution of morphologicalawareness was sizeable (9–14% of variance, depending onoutcome measure) and was accompanied by additional,comparable proportions of variance (9–15%) shared with theother measures, bringing up the total longitudinal predictedvariance from morphological awareness to more than 20% ofreading (and spelling) outcomes (except fluency).

DISCUSSION

In this longitudinal study we have investigated the predictionof reading and spelling outcomes near the end of Grade 1by language and metalinguistic skills assessed in preschool14 months earlier. Morphological awareness had a significantunique contribution to all outcome variables except readingfluency. This finding confirms the important role ofmorphological awareness for reading development and extendsit to a younger age than usually studied.

Our results are consistent with the findings of Casalis andLouis-Alexandre (2000), who studied early reading performancelongitudinally predicted by preschool phonological andmorphological awareness in French, and found both a strong

correlation between phonological and morphological awarenessat these ages as well as longitudinal relationships between bothof them and early reading. Our results are also compatiblewith those of Grigorakis and Manolitsis (2016), who examinedthe prediction of Grade 1 inflectional spelling by preschoolphonological and morphological awareness in Greek, andfound a significant longitudinal contribution of morphologicalawareness beyond phonological awareness and other controlvariables.

In particular with respect to spelling, one might expect anespecially important role of morphological awareness in Greek(Grigorakis and Manolitsis, 2016), because, as noted above, manyinflectional and derivational affixes are associated with specificspellings (and, indeed, some of them are homophonous andcan only be disambiguated by spelling). This hypothesis cannotbe evaluated in the current study because our strong result(1R2

= 0.085, p < 0.001) emerged using a standardized spellingtest including many words with difficult stems and not givingparticular weight to grammatical (i.e., inflectional suffix) spelling.This might be taken to imply that the relationship betweenmorphological awareness and spelling is not specific to suffixes.However, our results do not speak to the issue of a suffix-specificrelationship: It may well be the case that morphological awarenessis especially necessary – or beneficial – for spelling inflectionalsuffixes, 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 β p Unique Common Total Step R2 1R2 p

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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appropriately designed spelling tests assessing performance onparticular kinds of suffixes. Such studies should be performedwith older children, because suffix-specific spelling knowledge istaught after Grade 1. At any rate, our findings suggest that there isalso a more general sense in which early metalinguistic awarenesssupports the development of spelling skill. Whether this relatesto language or cognitive skills required for metalinguistic taskperformance is not known. Future studies must use appropriatelatent constructs to examine whether these observed longitudinalrelationships are direct or mediated by other, more general,constructs.

Our findings seem to be somewhat at odds with those ofManolitsis (2006), who found that preschool morphologicalawareness longitudinally predicted Grade 1 single word readingspeed, but not accuracy, after controlling for phonologicalawareness. We have not measured single word reading speed, sothis finding is not directly comparable to our measure of textreading fluency. The difference in the longitudinal predictionof word reading accuracy is difficult to explain conclusivelywithout more information; it may be attributable to differencesin the task content or task reliabilities. In particular, two of themorphological awareness tests used by Manolitsis had internalreliabilities less than 0.70, whereas the third one was a compoundinversion task, unlike the ones we used here. Despite thesedifferences, Manolitsis also found largely shared longitudinalcontributions from preschool phonological and morphologicalawareness to Grade 1 word reading. In other words his generalpattern of findings was not inconsistent with ours.

Vocabulary made a significant unique contribution only inthe prediction of reading comprehension, and this was largelyaccounted for by the receptive (picture selection) rather than theexpressive (verbal definitions) measure. This finding is consistentwith the role of vocabulary in the development of readingcomprehension that has been revealed in middle elementarygrades in Greek (Protopapas et al., 2007, 2013b). Vocabularywas not related to Grade 1 reading accuracy performance, evenwhen 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 sharedvariance related to these outcomes. This suggests that thesemorphological awareness tests capture language skills variancethat is relevant for reading development at this age (cf. Hjetlandet al., submitted).

It has long been known that phonological and morphologicalawareness share much of their variance at this age (e.g., Carlisleand Nomanbhoy, 1993) and thus it is no surprise that theircontribution to reading performance is largely shared (e.g.,Manolitsis, 2006). In our study, phonological awareness madea significant contribution to all reading outcomes (marginalfor comprehension) when entered after vocabulary, as expected.However, this was only significant for fluency and spelling, inwhich it included a substantial unique contribution (6–8%). Incontrast, the contribution of phonological awareness to word andpseudoword accuracy and reading comprehension was largelyshared with morphological awareness, ending up non-significantin the final multiple regression models. In particular, the uniquecontribution of phonological awareness to word and pseudowordreading accuracy, in the presence of morphological awareness,was less than 3% of the variance. One way to interpret this, goingbeyond any shared content between materials in phonologicaland morphological awareness tasks, is to consider the extentto which these morphological awareness tests may also capturemore general metalinguistic skill variance that is relevant forlearning to read.

This finding raises the interesting possibility that thepredictive power of phonological awareness for readingdevelopment may not be entirely due to its phonological naturebut 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 infollow-up research, in Greek and other languages, and in a widerrange of ages. One reason it has not been found in the few studiesthat have examined the longitudinal prediction of early readingoutcomes by preschool skills may have to do with psychometricissues. Specifically, tests of morphological awareness tend to beof 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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therefore may not pick up all the variance that can properly beattributed to a well-defined morphological awareness constructdue to measurement noise. Our study stands out for the very highreliability of both the phonological and morphological awarenessmeasures, allowing the regression models to capture substantialproportions of the reliable variance in the dependent variables.Ideally, future studies should include multiple highly reliabletasks as indices of corresponding latent constructs in order toexamine the relative contribution of different metalinguistic skillsto early reading outcomes as free from measurement noise aspossible.

In this work we have treated phonological and morphologicalawareness as unitary constructs, by combining responses frommultiple subtasks examining specific aspects of these domains.This methodological choice is supported by the very highreliability of the aggregated tasks. It is also supported bystrong evidence in favor of phonological awareness being aunidimensional 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, andboth judgment and production tasks, Diamanti et al. (in press)found that a single factor sufficed and accounted for 59% of thetotal variance, consistent with a unidimensional construct formorphological awareness as well [Muse (2005) as cited in Tigheand Schatschneider (2015)].

Our study joins the long list of studies, mentioned inthe introduction, in suggesting that an explicit understandingof linguistic structure is substantially predictive of futurereading performance. It provides an important confirmationof the importance of morphological awareness for readingdevelopment, by testing preliterate children, for whom areverse effect (of reading experience on the development ofmorphological awareness) is unlikely, and by employing highlyreliable tests covering different aspects of the target construct,such as a variety of suffixes and functions and tasks of differentformats and demands. In addition, our findings bring outdifferences in the relevance of phonological and morphologicalawareness 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 thatthe general cognitive demands of metalinguistic tasks may be ofutmost importance for the prediction of reading development,whereas the linguistic content of the tasks may be of secondaryimportance or critical for specific associations with particularreading skills. Given the increasing prominence of morphologicalawareness study in the reading literature, we expect that this issuewill be further investigated and clarified in future comprehensivestudies.

ETHICS STATEMENT

This study was carried out in accordance with the guidelines ofthe American Psychological Association for treatment of humanparticipants, with written informed consent obtained from theparents (or legal guardians) of all children participants, approvalby the school authorities, and oral assent of the children priorto test administration. The protocol was approved by the GreekMinistry of Education, following positive recommendation of theInstitute of Educational Policy.

AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

VD conceptualized this study. VD, AM, AR, FA, and SPcontributed to the design and implementation of data collection.AP conducted the statistical analysis of the data. VD andAP drafted the manuscript. All authors have contributed tothe writing and revising of the manuscript and agree to beaccountable for the content of the work.

FUNDING

This research was supported in part by a postdoctoralresearch fellowship to VD in the context of research program“The Foundation of Reading and Writing in a TransparentOrthography: Oral Language Development and Early LiteracySkills” funded by the University of Crete Special Account, PI: AM.

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Conflict of Interest Statement: The preschool measures reported here form partof a commercially available screening battery (Logometro, produced by Inte∗LearnMultimedia Educational Applications) designed by the authors, who receive partof the proceeds from its use.

Copyright © 2017 Diamanti, Mouzaki, Ralli, Antoniou, Papaioannou andProtopapas. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the CreativeCommons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction inother forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are creditedand that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with acceptedacademic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does notcomply with these terms.

Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 12 November 2017 | Volume 8 | Article 2039

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