Relationship of Morphology and Other Language Skills to Literacy Skills in At-Risk Second-Grade Readers and At-Risk Fourth-Grade Writers

Nagy, William
Berninger, Virginia
Abbott, Robert
Vaughan, Katherine
Vermeulen, Karin

¹School of Education, Seattle Pacific University
²Department of Educational Psychology, University of Washington.

³Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to William Nagy, School of Education, Seattle Pacific University, 3307 Third Avenue West, Seattle, Washington 98119-1950. E-mail: [email protected].

This article was supported by National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Grants P50HD33812-05 and R01-5HD25858-09.

Received May 3, 2002; Revision received April 11, 2003; Accepted April 23, 2003

Journal of Educational Psychology 95(4):p 730-742, December 2003.

Structural equation modeling evaluated the contribution of phonological, orthographic, morphological, and oral vocabulary factors to word reading, spelling, and reading comprehension outcomes in 98 2nd graders at risk for passing state standards in reading and to those same outcomes plus composing in 97 4th graders at risk for passing state standards in writing. For 2nd-grade children, morphology contributed uniquely to reading comprehension, and oral vocabulary and orthography contributed uniquely to word reading. For 4th-grade children, morphology and oral vocabulary did not contribute uniquely to any outcomes, but morphology and word reading were correlated, and orthography and phonology contributed uniquely to decoding words with affixes. Fourth graders are still learning to coordinate orthographic, phonological, and morphological cues in written words.