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Abstract

Children develop morphological awareness, or the understanding of words, throughout the primary school years and this helps them understand and use grammatical rules. It is possible that children gain a large part of this understanding from general years of experience with language or alternatively, from developing their reading skills. The aim of the current study was to explore how children use morphological awareness in reading and spelling, as well as how children with different reading abilities use morphological awareness. The main hypothesis was that the development of morphological awareness is influenced more by a child's reading ability than by their experience with language. Seventy-one primary school students from Grades 3, 4, and 5 from schools in the Hobart area (age M = 10 years, 2 months; SD = 10.7 months) completed the Word Identification reading subtest from the WRMT and the spelling subtest from the WRAT as well as experimental tests of real words and pseudowords along with a morphological awareness task. The results show that children with similar reading abilities tended to have similar scores across experimental measures, and that children with higher morphological awareness performed better on the reading and spelling tasks. This seems to support the assertion that it is reading ability, not experience with language, which contributes most to the development of morphological awareness.

Item Type:	Thesis - Coursework Master
Authors/Creators:	Kunz, AK
Keywords:	Grammar, Comparative and general, Reading (Primary)
Copyright Information:	Copyright 2011 the author - The University is continuing to endeavour to trace the copyright owner(s) and in the meantime this item has been reproduced here in good faith. We would be pleased to hear from the copyright owner(s).
Additional Information:	Thesis (MPsych(Clin))--University of Tasmania, 2011. Includes bibliographical references
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