A Review on Morphological Awareness Tasks in Normal and Dyslexia Children

Morphological awareness is a metalinguistic skill. It is assessed by manipulation of morphemes that are the smallest meaningful units. Children gradually face with words and morphemes in different context and learn morphological knowledge in third and fourth grades of elementary school. There is no comprehensive test to assess the morphological awareness in Iran. Therefore, there are a few studies that have investigated the relationship between morphological awareness and reading, using from own researcher developed tasks. This review study collected morphological awareness tasks from different studies in English.
Literature search was performed in SID, Iranmedex, Google Scholar, Scopus, Pubmed, Science Direct, Medline databases and American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. The articles were assessed based on the tasks and their psychometric properties.
22 tasks for assessment of morphological awareness were found. The psychometric properties were assessed for all of these tasks. From all of tasks, 20 of them had reliability or internal consistency. The tasks include three types of morphological awareness (inflectional, derivational and compounding process).
Many of these tasks were developed by the researchers based on the aim of studies. These aims were considering the morphological awareness in word and non-word context and study of the effect of phonological knowledge on non-word, comparing between sentences from morphological perspective, morphological innovation and manipulation, compounding of morphemes for construction of new compound word and morphemes reading. Psychometric properties of the tasks were discussed in this article. According to internal consistency quantity, the tasks that have appropriate reliability or internal consistency, including: sentence combining task, sentence completion task, dynamic morpheme production task, comes from task, Judgment of pseudo word inflection task, Morphological relatedness task, rehit task, Phonological and morphological strategies use for reading and spelling, relative task, the morphological spelling test, Derivational suffix choice task, Morphological structure task, the morphological awareness task and TOLD.