Relationship between Morphological Awareness and Reading: A Review Article

Morphological awareness is one of the dimensions of metalinguistic awareness and is defined as the ability to manipulate morphemes that make up the word and knowledge of the rules of word formation. Previous studies have shown that morphological awareness contributes to literacy achievement. The purpose of the present study was to review the literature available in the context of morphological awareness and its relevance to the accuracy and comprehension of reading in different languages.

Studies conducted between 1995 and 2017 and published in the Springer, Google scholar, ASHA, Science Direct, PubMed international databases as well as domestic dissertations and journals in Magiran and SID databases were searched. Descriptive-analytic studies that could answer the research question were included in the study. The search was performed using the following keywords: morphological awareness, reading ability, reading accuracy, reading comprehension, and educational achievement. The results of 18 articles are presented in the current review study.

The results showed that children with better scores in the morphological awareness test show better results in reading comprehension. In languages such as English, morphological awareness helps to distinguish between words and thus help reading accuracy, but not in Greek. It seems that the relationship between morphological awareness and reading accuracy is different between different languages, according to language properties such as transparency.