Investigating the Relationship Between Morphological Awareness and Reading Skills in the Third and Fourth Grade Dyslexia and Normal Developing Readers

Reading is defined as the ability to understand and use written language which is done via conversion of grapheme to phoneme. Morphological Awareness (MA) is the ability of conscious manipulation of morpheme which is the smallest meaningful language unit. The relationship between reading ability and MA is bidirectional. Many aspects of reading are predicted by MA. In Iran, one study has been conducted on this relationship. Regarding this issue, the main aim of the current study is to investigate the relationship between reading and MA. Because, the explicit MA (conscious use of morphemes) appears in the third and fourth graders, we studied the relationship between dyslexia and normal readers in these two graders.
In this cross-sectional study, 34 normally developed readers (22 boys and 12 girls) and 20 dyslexic students participated. Teacher questionnaire and NAMA test were used for dyslexia diagnosis. In addition, NAMA test for reading evaluation and MA test for assessment of morphological knowledge were used. Normal distribution of the data was examined by 1-sample Kolmogorov Smirnov test, while the data were analyzed by Pearson and Spearman Correlation Coefficient.
In normal students, there is a relationship between word comprehension task and total score of morphological awareness test (Correlation Coefficient=0.70), between word reading and construct formation task (CC=0.46), between text comprehension and dynamic morpheme production task (CC=0.57), and between phoneme deletion and total score of morphological awareness test (CC=0.63). In dyslexic children, the relationships exist between word comprehension and construct formation (CC=0.60), between dynamic morpheme production (CC=0.78), and total score of morphological awareness test (CC=0.67), between text comprehension and morphological awareness task (CC=0.64), and between word chain and morpheme identification task (CC=0.78).
According to statistical analyses, some tasks of MA were correlated with some reading tasks; we believe the tasks used for reading skills could have influenced these results. The tasks of the present study for reading skills assessment were different from the tasks of other studies.