The relationship between morphological awareness and reading comprehension: a systematic review and meta-analysis
Creators: name: Groen, Margriet
name: Yazhi Liu
name: Cain, Kate
Publisher: name: OSF Registries
Year: 2023
Subjects: subject: Reading and Language
subject: Arts and Humanities

description: Morphemes are the smallest units of meaning in language. For example, the word “assessment” means “to make a judgment about something” and is made up of two morphemes: the base “assess” and the suffix “-ment”; adding the prefix “re-” to make the word “reassessment” changes its meaning to ‘to assess something again’. In English, which is the focus of this review, morphologically complex words are formed by three processes: compounding, inflection and derivation (Carlisle, 2000). Compounding involves combining two or more morphemes to create a new word which has the same grammatical class but a different meaning (e.g., police- policeman). Inflection involves adding affixes to mark grammatical information on words without changing the grammatical category of the base words (e.g., walk- walked; Bybee, 1985; Bybee &amp; Slobin, 1982). Derivation involves the addition of affixes to a word, and results in a change of meaning, as well as a change in grammatical category (e.g., health- healthy). For some time, it has been argued that an understanding of morphemes, and morphological awareness specifically, is beneficial to reading comprehension (e.g., Carlisle, 2010). 
Morphological awareness assesses the “conscious awareness of the morphemic structure of words and somebody’s ability to reflect on and manipulate that structure” (Carlisle, 1995, p.194). Morphological awareness includes awareness of: the spoken and printed forms of morphemes; the meaning affixes bring to base words (e.g., how -ed causes a verb to refer to the past or how re- means something occurred again); the manner in which printed affixes connect to base words (e.g., how some suffixes require a consonant to be doubled or dropped when attached to a base word in written form); and the relation between base words and their inflected or derived forms (e.g., knowing that a variety of words are related because they share the same base word, such as act, action, react, and activity) (Apel et al., 2014). We will examine these different aspects of morphological awareness in this meta-analysis.
Morphological awareness and its development have been studied in pre-schoolers through to adults, but most research in this area has focused on children from 5 years to 12 years of age, perhaps because studies of morphological awareness typically examine its relationship with reading development (e.g., Carlisle, 1995; Deacon &amp; Kirby, 2004; Nagy et al., 2006). Morphological awareness of compounding is evident in preschoolers (Clark et al., 1986); 6-year-olds do well on assessments of compounding, and there is little gain in scores between 10 to 13 years, where children are performing close to ceiling (James et al., 2020). Improvements in awareness of inflections is evident between 5 to 11 years (Casalis &amp; Luis-Alexandre, 2000; James et al., 2020; Kuo &amp; Anderson, 2006). Similarly, gains in morphological awareness of derivation is evident from 6 to 12 years (Anglin, 1993; Carlisle, 2000, James et al., 2020; Kirby &amp; Deacon, 2004; Robertson &amp; Deacon, 2019). Morphological awareness of these three forms has been found to be positively associated with reading comprehension in English-speaking children aged 5-14 years (e.g., Carlisle, 1995; Deacon &amp; Kirby, 2004; Nagy et al., 2006). 
Many different tasks have been used to measure morphological awareness, such as the Word Analogy Task developed by Kirby et al. (2012), the Test of Morphological Structure from Carlisle (2000) and the Suffix Choice Task (real word) from Nagy et al. (2003). In the Word Analogy Task, participants are presented with a pair of morphologically related words (e.g., work: worker), followed by the first word of the second pair (teach: __). The participant is asked to complete the pattern by providing the second word in the second pair to match the model of the first (correct response: teacher). Carlisle’s (2000) Test of Morphological Structure involves presenting participants with a sentence frame that they have to complete (e.g., Farm. My uncle is a ___. [farmer]). In Nagy et al.’s (2003) Suffix Choice Task, participants are given a context sentence (e.g., “Did you hear the ________?”), and have to choose which of four words fits on the basis of its inflectional or derivational suffix: the four words have different suffixes that signal parts of speech (e.g., directs, directions, directing, or directed). Although the Word Analogy Task and the Test of Morphological Structure are quite different in their format, in each the participant is presented with the base form and required to produce a derivation or inflection; thus, these two tasks assess awareness of the relation of base words to their inflected and derived forms. In contrast, the Suffix Choice Task assesses awareness of the meaning of affixes and the change in grammatical class they bring to base words. It is also important to note that, even for the same test, the input or the output could be different. For example, Carlisle (2000) and Stark (2011) both used the Test of Morphological Structure, but Carlisle presented the stimuli aurally and Stark presented the stimuli in written form, each with similar age groups. Carlisle (2000) found a stronger relationship between morphological awareness and reading comprehension than did Stark (2011), which indicates that this is a factor that needs to be researched. 
Not all measures of morphological awareness use real words; many studies include measures that have pseudoword stimuli. For example, in the Affix Meaning Task (Apel &amp; Henbest, 2016), students are provided a pseudoword and its definition and then asked to choose one inflected or derived form of the pseudoword from among four options (e.g., If glack means tell, then which word means to tell again? [a] glackish, [b] reglack, [c] glackable, [d] disglack). Real words are a part of vocabulary knowledge, while pseudowords are not (Tighe &amp; Schatschneider, 2015). If pseudowords are used, students can select the correct option only if they understand the meaning of the morphemes. In contrast, if real word stimuli are used, participants may correctly perform the task by reference to their vocabulary knowledge of the stimuli, rather than specific awareness of the morphemes. This is because a real word, if known to the child, has a memory representation that can include its phonological (spoken) form, its orthographic (written) form, its meaning, its grammatical class etc. If real words are used, it is difficult to differentiate between whether the reader is able to explicitly apply morphological rules or is simply applying prior knowledge about the word. For example, the Test of Morphological Structure uses real word stimuli (e.g., Farm. My uncle is a ___.) and could be completed by reference to knowledge of morphology, vocabulary or grammar. Conversely, the reader is forced to utilize his or her knowledge of morphological rules with pseudowords because there is no meaning attributed to a pseudoword. Siegel (2008) reported that tasks using pseudowords are more difficult than those using real words for students with reading difficulties. Tighe and Schatschneider (2015) also found that the results of morphological awareness with real words and pseudowords were different. Thus, this factor could affect the relationship between morphological awareness and reading comprehension.
Just as there are many different measures of morphological awareness, there are also many different reading comprehension tests, and it has been demonstrated that they are not necessarily interchangeable; different tasks have different formats and show different strengths of relation with reading ability (Keenan et al., 2008). According to Gough and Tunmer’s (1986) influential simple view of reading, reading comprehension is the product of two components: decoding and listening comprehension. There is evidence that measures of reading comprehension differ in the strength of their relationship to each component. Keenan et al. (2008) assessed children’s reading comprehension with the Woodcock–Johnson Passage Comprehension–3 (WJPC-3), the Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT), the Gray Oral Reading Test–3 (GORT-3), and the Qualitative Reading Inventory–3 (QRI-3). The WJPC-3 presents participants with sentence and short paragraph stimuli and is a cloze task, in which participants are asked to supply a missing word. In the PIAT, participants are presented with a sentence and required to select a match for its meaning from one of four pictures. The GORT-3 and QRI-3 require participants to read paragraphs and short passages and answer open-ended questions, after the text. In a study of 8 to 18-year-olds, Keenan et al. (2008) found that performance on the WJPC-3 and the PIAT were more strongly related to independent measures of decoding than listening comprehension; in contrast performance on the GORT-3 and the QRI-3 were more strongly related to listening comprehension. In one study (Cain et al., 2001), 8-year-old poor comprehenders and age-matched typical readers were measured with literal and inferential questions based on the same story. Typical readers recalled more literal information and made more correct inferences than poor comprehenders. These striking differences between the features of different reading comprehension tasks and their relationship with the two components of the simple view of reading, highlight the need to take into account the format of the reading comprehension test when assessing the strength of its relationship with morphological awareness.
Several meta-analyses that focus on morphological awareness and reading ability have been carried out to date. These have focused on studies of intervention or instruction in morphology on literacy outcomes (Goodwin &amp; Ahn, 2010, 2013), compared the relationship between morphological awareness and reading comprehension for different writing systems (Chinese and English) (Ruan et al., 2018), compared the relationship between morphological awareness and biliteracy (Ke et al., 2020), and the relationship between morphological awareness and literacy outcomes including reading comprehension (Lee, 2011). All studies demonstrated the relationship between morphological awareness and reading comprehension in many different areas. In this study, we will focus on morphological awareness in English and its relation to reading comprehension.
The studies by Ke et al. (2020), Lee (2011) and Ruan et al. (2018) all examined the relationship between morphological awareness and reading comprehension. Lee (2011) analysed 44 studies to examine the relationship between morphological awareness and different components of literacy (i.e., word reading, reading comprehension, and spelling) in elementary-aged students of different grade levels and learner types. No significant difference in the mean relationship between morphological awareness and reading comprehension was evident either by learner type (typical vs. struggling and mixed learners), grade (K-G3 vs. G4-6th) or form of morphologically complex words (derivation vs. inflection). The author did not take into account different test formats for the various measures and also noted limitations in the coding scheme used, both of which may have impacted findings. In addition, there has been considerable interested in morphological awareness and reading ability since Lee’s (2011) study was conducted, resulting in a larger number of papers to include in the current meta-analysis. 
Ruan et al. (2018) analysed 32 studies in Chinese and 32 studies in English to examine if the relationships between phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and reading (accuracy, fluency, and comprehension) differs between English and Chinese. Relevant to the current study are the findings for English participants. Ruan et al. (2018) found that the correlations between morphological awareness and reading comprehension remained significant even after controlling for each other’s effect. However, they did not test the effect of age, forms of morphologically complex words and measures of morphological awareness and reading comprehension.
Ke et al. (2020) analysed 34 studies to examine the crosslinguistic sharing (or transfer) of morphological awareness in biliteracy development. They explored the effect of grades and morphological awareness tests on the relationship between morphological awareness and reading comprehension. However, in their study, they divided studies based on writing system type (e.g. alphabet, abjed, alphasyllabary, syllabary, and morphosyllabary), rather than language. Thus, their findings do not focus on English. The authors first considered the effect of different morphological awareness tests in their meta-analysis, but they measured just 4 and did not consider the difference between tests which can help explain the effect of morphological awareness measurements. In addition, they did not examine the effect of reading comprehension tests.
In the current study, we will do a systematic review and meta-analysis that focuses on morphological awareness in English and its relation to reading comprehension. We will explore the effect of age on the relationship between morphological awareness and reading comprehension, the differences between awareness of different forms of morphologically complex words and reading comprehension, the effect of the characteristics of different measures of morphological awareness and also different measures of reading comprehension on the relationship between morphological awareness and reading comprehension.