The role of morphological processing in the reading abilities of middle school students

Morphemes (e.g., stems, affixes) are the smallest units of meaning in words. Morphological processing is the use of morphological structure during word reading. Morphological processing may contribute to quick and effortless word reading (i.e., automaticity), thus supporting higher-level reading skills. This study investigated whether automatic morphological processing made a unique contribution to the decoding, oral reading fluency, and reading comprehension abilities of middle school students. In addition, this study asked whether these contributions differed for students with word reading difficulties.

Seventh- and eighth-grade students (n = 80) participated in the study. Students were divided into two reading ability groups: proficient readers (n = 55) and student with word reading difficulties (n = 25). All students completed two remote sessions. In the first session, students took six assessments to assess their reading and oral language abilities. In the second session, eight computer-administered experimental tasks were used to measure automaticity in reading morphological (bimorphemic) words and nonmorphological (monomorphemic) words. In half of the trials, the words were masked (covered up) and in the other half, the words were unmasked (uncovered).

Results indicated automaticity in reading nonmorphological words most consistently accounted for unique variance in decoding and oral reading fluency. However, automaticity in reading morphological words was the only independent variable that accounted for unique variance in reading comprehension, and it also accounted for unique variance in oral reading fluency. There was no evidence that middle school students with word reading difficulties used morphological processing in ways that differed from proficient readers.