Investigating the relationship between morphological awareness and reading skills in the third and fourth-grade dyslexia and normal developing readers

Background and objective: Reading is defined as the ability to understand and use written language which is actually done via graphemeto phoneme conversion. Morphological awareness (MA) is the ability of conscious manipulation of morpheme whichis the smallest meaningful language unit. The relationship between reading ability and MA is bidirectional. Many aspects of reading are predicted by MA. In Iran there is one study about this relationship. Regarding this issue, the main aim of current study is to investigate the relationship between reading and MA.Because, the explicit MA (conscious use of morphemes) reveals in the third and fourth grades, we studied the relationship between dyslexia and normal readers in these two grades.Materials and methods: In this cross-sectional study, 34 normally developed readers (22 male-12 female) and 20 dyslexic students participated. Teacher questionnaire and NAMA test were used for dyslexia diagnosis. In addition NAMA test for reading evaluation and MA test for assessment of morphological knowledge were used. Normal distribution of data was studied by one sample Kolmogorov Smirnov Test and data analyzed by Pearson and Spearman Correlation Coefficient.Findings: We found that in normal students there is a relationship between word comprehension task with total score of morphological awareness test (CC28=0/70), Word reading with construct formation task (CC=0/46), text comprehension with dynamic morpheme production task(CC=0/57) and phoneme deletion with total score of morphological awareness test (CC=0/63). In dyslexic children, the relationships were for word comprehension with construct formation (CC=0/60), dynamic morpheme production (CC=0/78), and total score of morphological awareness test (CC=0/67), text comprehension with morphological awareness task (CC=0/64) and word chain with morpheme identification task (CC=0/78).Conclusion: According to statistical analyses just some tasks of MA were correlated with some reading tasks, we believed the tasks that used for reading skills could have influenced on these results. The tasks of present study for reading skills assessment were different from the tasks of other studies.

کلیدواژه ها:

Reading ، Morphological awareness ، normal development ، dyslexia ، childre