EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGIST, 41(3), 161–180

Copyright © 2006, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

KUO AND ANDERSON
MORPHOLOGICAL AWARENESS AND READING

Morphological Awareness and Learning to Read:

A Cross-Language Perspective
Li-jen Kuo and Richard C. Anderson
Center for the Study of Reading
University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign

In the past decade, there has been a surge of interest in morphological awareness, which refers
to the ability to reflect on and manipulate morphemes and word formation rules in a language.
This review provides a critical synthesis of empirical studies on this topic from a broad
cross-linguistic perspective. Research with children speaking several languages indicates that
knowledge of inflectional morphology is acquired before knowledge of derivational morphol-
ogy and the morphology of compounds, which continue to develop through the elementary
school years. Research establishes that morphological awareness contributes to the decoding of
morphologically complex words and contributes to the development of reading comprehen-
sion, although the relationship is probably reciprocal rather than unidirectional. Morphological
awareness becomes an increasingly important predictor of measures of reading as children
grow older. Morphological awareness is intertwined with other aspects of metalinguistic
awareness and linguistic competence—notably, phonological awareness, syntactic awareness,
and vocabulary knowledge. Lack of satisfactory control of these intertwined elements is one of
several shortcomings of the existing literature.

Learning to read is “fundamentally metalinguistic”
(Mattingly, 1984; Nagy & Anderson, 1999). It has long been
argued that the ability to abstract language from meaningful
contexts and to reflect upon its structural properties is a criti-
cal component in language development and, in particular, in
the development of reading. In research on the relationship
between different facets of metalinguistic awareness and
learning to read, considerable attention has been given to
phonological awareness (for a review, see Goswami, 2000).
It has been shown that phonological awareness not only plays
a key role in the learning of alphabetic languages (e.g.,
Bradley & Bryant, 1983), but also in the learning of
logographic languages such as Chinese (e.g., Ho, Law, & Ng,
2000; Li, Anderson, Nagy, & Zhang, 2002).
However, reading is more than converting orthographic
forms into phonological forms. Comprehension can only
be achieved when the converted phonological forms are
mapped onto semantic information. The smallest phono-
logical unit that carries semantic information is a mor-
pheme. The ability to reflect upon and manipulate mor-
Correspondence should be addressed to Li-jen Kuo, Center for the
Study of Reading, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, 158
Children’s Research Center, 51 Gerty Dr., Champaign, IL 61820. E-mail:
lijenkuo@uiuc.edu
phemes and employ word formation rules in one’s lan-
guage is therefore referred to as morphological awareness.
This topic has not been vigorously investigated in reading
research until recently. Yet, since morphological aware-
ness provides the avenue to comprehension, it is important
for reading researchers as well as reading instructors to un-
derstand the developmental course of different aspects of
morphological awareness and how these are related to
reading achievement.
Morphological awareness comprises primarily knowl-
edge about the pairing of sound and meaning in a lan-
guage and the word formation rules that guide the possible
combination of morphemes. For example, [bjutIfUl],
beautiful, is composed of two morphemes: the stem
[bjUtI], which denotes a quality that pleases or delights
the senses, and the suffix [fUl], which marks the word as
an adjective and denotes having the quality specified in
the stem. Note that it is the pairing of semantic informa-
tion with the phonological representation, not the ortho-
graphic representation, that is the core property of a mor-
pheme (Jannedy, Poletto, & Weldon, 1994).
It is essential to clarify the construct morphological aware-
ness at the outset of this review because the term has received
multiple interpretations in reading research and, in particular,
has been extended to include orthographic aspects of learning
162 KUO AND ANDERSON
to read (e.g., Li et al., 2002). To avoid possible confusion in
later discussions in this article, we propose the scheme in
Figure 1 to differentiate the different subcomponents that have
been included in the umbrella construct of morphological
awareness in recent reading research. The three circles repre-
sent three major facets of metalinguistic awareness: phono-
logical awareness, orthographic awareness, and semantic
awareness. As already defined in reading research, phonolog-
ical awareness and orthographic awareness refer to the abili-
ties to manipulate and reflect upon the sounds and the ortho-
graphic representations of one’s language, respectively
(Henderson & Chard, 1980; Nagy& Anderson, 1999). Seman-
tic awareness is defined as the knowledge about how mean-
ings are organized in a language. For example, in English, the
meaning of a verb rarely includes an action plus its object
(Nagy & Scott, 1990). According to Nagy and Gentner (1990),
understanding the pattern of word meaning in one’s language
may facilitate the process of constructing and evaluating hy-
potheses about the possible meanings of unfamiliar words.
The four intersecting areas in Figure 1 are
graphophonological awareness, morphological awareness,
graphosemantic awareness, and graphomorphological
awareness. Graphophonological awareness is the knowl-
edge about the grapheme-phoneme and phoneme-grapheme
conversion rules of a language. Morphological awareness, as
defined earlier, refers to the knowledge about the pairings of
sound and meaning in a language. Graphosemantic aware-
ness refers to the knowledge about how semantic information
is encoded in the orthography and how orthography provides
cues to meaning. For example, in Chinese, the orthographic
unit that encodes a morpheme is a character. The majority of
the characters have a constituent unit called a radical.
Though radicals do not carry any phonological information,
they usually provide partial but reliable cues to the meaning
of a character, and it has been reported that they play a critical
role in Chinese children’s literacy development (e.g., Ho, Ng,
FIGURE 1 Interrelation between different aspects of
metalinguistic awareness.
& Ng, 2003; Ho, Wong, & Chan, 1999; Shu & Anderson,
1997). Another example of a graphosemantic feature is the
marking of nouns with capitalized letters in German. Finally,
graphomorphological awareness1 refers to the ability to co-
ordinate orthographic, phonological, and semantic informa-
tion during reading.
The umbrella construct morphological awareness in cur-
rent literature includes the following subcomponents de-
picted in Figure 1: orthographic awareness, graphosemantic
awareness, semantic awareness, morphological awareness,
and graphomorphological awareness. However, in this re-
view, morphological awareness refers only to the ability to
manipulate morphemes and employ word formation rules.
There are at least three reasons why there should be a
strong relationship between morphological awareness and
learning to read. First, morphemes have semantic as well as
phonological and syntactic properties (Mahony, Singson, &
Mann, 2000). Morphological awareness is thus integrally re-
lated to other aspects of language knowledge and may pro-
vide a “more general index of metalinguistic capability” than
phonological or syntactic awareness considered alone
(Carlisle, 1995, p. 192).
A second reason to relate morphological awareness and
learning to read is concerned with the way the mature mental
lexicons are organized. Psycholinguistic studies involving
adults have consistently shown that morphological informa-
tion is utilized when processing complex words (Nagy et al.,
1989; Napps, 1989; for reviews, see Clahsen, Sonnenstuhl, &
Blevins, 2003 and Harley, 2001). For example, root frequency
affects the processing of morphologically complex words in
alphabetical languages (e.g., Burani & Caramazza, 1987;
Niswander, Pollatsek, & Rayner, 2000). In research involving
speakers of logographic languages such as Chinese, similar re-
sults in support of a morpheme-based mental lexicon have also
been obtained (e.g., Zhou & Marslen-Wilson, 1994, 1995).
The fact that the mental lexicon of adult readers is mor-
phologically organized suggests that morphological knowl-
edge may serve as a framework to efficiently store words
(Sandra, 1994). Thus, children with more developed mor-
phological knowledge may have an advantage in acquiring
and retaining morphologically complex vocabulary. Expe-
dited learning of morphologically complex vocabulary is
crucial because such vocabulary may make up 60% to 80%
of the new words acquired by school-aged children (Anglin,
1993; Nagy & Anderson, 1984). Given that vocabulary is a
strong indicator of reading performance (Anderson &
Freebody, 1981), morphological awareness should play a
substantial role in reading development.
1The term graphomorphological awareness first appeared in Nagy et al.
(2002) and is defined as an understanding of “the nature of the writing sys-
tem and of the mappings between the elements of the spoken and written lan-
guages” (p. 64). However, it should be noted that this term receives a some-
what different definition in this article.

A third reason to postulate a strong relationship between
morphological awareness and reading development is that
morphological awareness may provide readers additional in-
sight into the writing system (Nagy, Berninger, Abbott,
Vaughan, & Vermeulen, 2003). Many writing systems encode
both phonological and morphological information. A princi-
ple that applies to many alphabetic languages is the
isomorphism principle, which states that morphemes tend to
receive a constant orthographic representation regardless of
phonological shift due to affixation, as in sign-signature;
heal-health; and produce-production (Verhoeven, Schreuder,
& Baayen, 2003). On the other hand, morphemes that are pro-
nounced the same often differ in spelling, for example,
to-two-too and its-it’s. A similar pattern exists in Chinese, a
logographic language, where morphemes pronounced with
the same syllable generally have distinctive orthographic
forms. Having more developed morphological awareness and
being better able to identify allomorphs (different phonologi-
cal representations of the same morpheme, e.g., [saIn] in sign
and [sIg] in signature) would enable readers to read morpho-
logically complex words more accurately and fluently.
The foregoing overview has provided the rationale for de-
fining morphological awareness in conjunction with other
aspects of metalinguistic awareness and provided the frame-
work for examining the relationship between morphological
awareness and literacy development. Next, we review empir-
ical studies that have examined the role of morphological
awareness in the reading development of school-aged chil-
dren. The cross-language perspective adopted in the follow-
ing review will allow for a critical examination of the role of
morphological awareness in literacy development, including
both features common across all languages and those unique
to a particular language.
This review aims to address two major issues from a
cross-language perspective: a) the developmental course of
different aspects of morphological awareness and its relation
to other aspects of metalinguistic awareness; and b) the role
morphological awareness play in reading development. The
remainder of the review is organized into three major sections
that address these two major issues. The first section discusses
children’s acquisition of different aspects of morphology. The
second section examines methodological issues in assessing
children’s morphological awareness. The third section is a
critical synthesis of findings from research on the relationship
between morphological awareness and reading development.
The review concludes with an evaluation of pedagogical im-
plications of research on morphological awareness and a sum-
mary of promising areas for future research.
ACQUISITION OF MORPHOLOGY
Research on children’s acquisition of morphology and mor-
phological awareness has focused on the acquisition of three
types of morphology: inflections (e.g., Berko, 1958; Casalis
MORPHOLOGICAL AWARENESS AND READING 163
& Louis-Alexandre, 2000; Cazden, 1968; Kuczaj, 1977,
1978; Perez-Pereira, 1988; Selby, 1972), derivatives (e.g., Ku
& Anderson, 2003; Leong, 1989, Lewis & Windsor, 1996;
Tyler & Nagy, 1989), and compounds (e.g., Berko, 1958;
Elbro & Arnbak, 1996; Clark & Berman, 1984, 1987; Ku &
Anderson, 2003). Inflectional morphology is concerned with
the systematic marking of grammatical function on a word
stem as required by the syntax. Inflectional morphemes typi-
cally mark syntactic or semantic relations between different
words in a sentence without altering the meaning or the part
of speech of the stem. For example, verbs in English may be
marked by inflectional morphemes for tense (e.g., explain
explained) and person (e.g., I turn she turns). Nouns may
be inflectionally marked for agreement with other words in
the sentence in terms of number (e.g., one book two
books). Derivation involves the addition of a morpheme to
change the part of speech or the meaning of a base morpheme
(e.g., the verb explain can be changed to a noun by adding a
nominalizing morpheme, as in explanation). Compared with
inflectional morphemes, derivational morphemes are usually
less productive and more restrictive in terms of what types of
base morphemes with which they can be combined. For ex-
ample, in English, -able can only be attached to verbs but not
to nouns to form adjectives. Finally, compounding refers to
the formation of new words by combining two or more words
or roots (e.g., biosphere, cupcake, forecast, overbook). The
parts of a compound can be derived words (e.g., computer
programmer) or inflected words (e.g., house-keeping).
A distinction needs to be made between the acquisition of
morphology and the development of morphological aware-
ness. While the former is concerned with development of the
ability to comprehend and produce morphologically com-
plex words in natural speech, the latter focuses on the ability
to reflect on and manipulate word formation rules in the ab-
sence of a communicative context. Instead of treating the two
as distinct constructs, it would be more reasonable to concep-
tualize morphological awareness as a subset construct within
the broader scope of acquisition of morphology. Morpholog-
ical awareness can be seen as the more explicit representation
and manipulation of implicitly acquired morphological rules.
Acquisition of Inflectional Morphology
Berko (1958) conducted one of the first systematic studies of
children’s awareness of inflectional morphology. The study
involved children ranging in ages from 4 to 7 years old. They
were presented with a sentence containing a pseudoword and
then asked to supply the plural, verb tense, or possessive of the
pseudoword. For example, the experimenter showed a picture
of a bird-like animal and said, “This is a wug. Now there is an-
other one. There are two of them. There are two ___.” The child
was supposed to answer “wugs.” Findings from Berko’s clas-
sic “wug” study show that a) children in preschool have al-
ready developed some knowledge of the functions of inflec-
tional markers and may be able manipulate them with new
164 KUO AND ANDERSON
words; b) such knowledge improves significantly from pre-
school to first grade; and c) although the development of in-
flectional morphology varies with the complexity of the in-
flected forms, most inflectional principles are acquired by the
early elementary grades. Berko’s wug study has been repli-
cated in research involving English-speaking children
(Anisfeld & Tucker, 1968; Carlisle, 1995; Derwing & Baker,
1977), Russian-speaking children (Bogoyavlenskii, 1973),
French-speaking children (Casalis & Louis-Alexandre,
2000), Turkish-speaking children (Fowler, Feldman,
Andjelkovic & Oney, 2003), and Serbian-Croatian children
(Feldman & Andjelkovic, 1992; Fowler et al., 2003). Results
similar to Berko’s (1958) were obtained across all these stud-
ies with children speaking different alphabetic languages.
Findings indicating that awareness of inflectional mor-
phology develops prior to formal literacy instruction have
been further supported by studies analyzing young children’s
use of inflections in natural speech (Berman, 1981; Cazden,
1968; Kuczaj, 1977, 1978; Marcus, Pinker, Ullman, & Hol-
lander, 1992). These studies have consistently shown that the
acquisition of inflectional morphology follows a fairly fixed
time course: First, children develop a simple schema for in-
flection. Next, they move through a period where they over
generalize the schema to irregular items (e.g., *foots, *goed;
asterisks indicate “made-up” words). And finally, the schema
becomes more elaborated and children learn to distinguish
regular from irregular items.
It is worth noting a parallel finding by Berko (1958) and
Cazden (1968). Berko’s (1958) results show that producing
plurals is easier for both preschool children and first graders
than producing possessives, and producing progressives
(e.g., Mom is cooking dinner) is easier than producing past
tenses (e.g., Mom cooked dinner). Similarly, Cazden (1968),
in her 5-year longitudinal study tracing the acquisition of in-
flections by three children whose ages at the beginning of the
study ranged from 18 months to 28 months, found that plu-
rals are acquired before possessives and that present progres-
sives are acquired before simple past and present tenses. The
two studies differ in terms of the age of the participants and
the research methods. Cazden’s (1968) participants were
younger than Berko’s (1958). While Cazden (1968) docu-
mented children’s use of inflections in natural speech, Berko
(1958) examined children’s intentional manipulation of in-
flected forms. Yet findings from the two studies converge on
a parallel developmental pattern. Taken together, these two
studies illustrate the stage theory of metalinguistic develop-
ment (Gombert, 1992; Valtin, 1984), according to which the
development of metalinguistic awareness begins with a stage
in which knowledge is below the threshold of consciousness.
During this stage children can demonstrate functional control
of the language in rich pragmatic contexts. This stage evolves
into a stage of “actual awareness,” when children are able to
“abstract the language from the action and the meaning con-
text and to think about the properties of the form of the lan-
guage,” and finally reaches a “conscious awareness” stage,
where children are able to “deliberately focus on and manip-
ulate linguistic units” (Valtin, 1984, pp. 214, 215).
Although children who learn to read alphabetic languages
are able to understand the functional aspect of inflectional
morphology by the early elementary grades, they still may
have trouble comprehending and producing inflectional allo-
morphs, for example, the different phonological realizations
of the past tense morpheme in raced and rated. Jones (1991)
conducted one of the few studies of children’s comprehen-
sion of allomorphs. Instead of looking at whether children
could inflect base morphemes, he took a somewhat different
track and studied the ability to recognize a base by asking his
participants to omit the inflectional morpheme. Jones’ proce-
dure was as follows: The examiner read a sentence contain-
ing a test word. The participant was asked to repeat the test
word. Then the participant was asked to pronounce the test
word again but leave off the inflectional morpheme or the fi-
nal syllable (e.g., “Say the word getting again, but leave off
the ing.”). And finally, the participant was asked to explain
the meaning of the fragment he or she produced. All the test
words were real words known to the participants and repre-
sented a range of cases where the surface phonetic forms are
different from the underlying morphophonemic representa-
tion. Both morphologically complex and morphologically
simple words of more than one syllable were included. Jones’
results indicated that both good and poor first-grade readers
have to some extent developed an abstract level of morpho-
phonemic representation. For example, children responded
differently to an inflected word and a single-morpheme
words that contain a medial flap (the consonant between the
two vowels in words such as getting, cattle, pudding).
Children tended to convert the flap in an inflected word (e.g.,
getting) into /t/ rather than /d/ when they left off the final syl-
lable. However, when the flap occurs in a single-morpheme
word (e. g., cattle), they converted it to /d/ or /t/ about equally.
Thus, the findings suggest that first graders have begun to de-
velop abstract morphophonemic representations that allow
alternative surface realizations.
Most of the studies on the acquisition of allomorphs focus
on the inflectional morphemes but not the stems. Yet, many
seemingly irregular inflected stems, in fact, vary in a predict-
able pattern (McClelland & Patterson, 2002). For example,
English has form-related families for many of its irregular
past tense verbs, such as ring rang, sing sang; weep
wept, creep crept; bend bent, send sent. Berko (1958)
found that adult native speakers of English tended to form the
past tense of pseudowords such as gling following the pattern
in form-related families, while first graders were not aware of
the systematicity in “irregular” past-tense forms. The age at
which children begin to appreciate the systematicity in irreg-
ular inflected stems is another issue that needs to be ad-
dressed in future research.
There has been little research on the acquisition of inflec-
tional morphology in nonalphabetic languages, and the few
available findings remain inconclusive. In a review of research

on Chinese, Chang (1992) reported that the acquisition of the
aspect marker -le develops over a long period, partly due to the
fact that it has multiple semantic functions. Little is known
about the acquisition of other common Chinese inflectional
morphemes—such as the progressive marker, - zhe; the
marker of past experience – guo; and the potentializing end-
ings, –de-liao and bu-liao, which denote the potential for com-
pleting a task. To what extent these inflectional morphemes
can be manipulated in the abstract by Chinese-speaking chil-
dren is an issue needing further investigation.
To sum up, research consistently shows that children learn-
ing alphabetic languages are able to manipulate the functional
aspect of inflectional morphology by the early elementary
grades. However, their mastery of inflectional allomorphs is still
incomplete at this stage. It remains unclear in the literature by
what age children fully grasp the abstract morphophonemic
representations of inflected lexical items. Obviously, more
cross-linguistic research needs to be done to obtain a more com-
prehensive understanding of children’s acquisition of inflec-
tional morphology. For example, inflectional morphology in
some languages, such as Chinese, rarely involves phonological
shifts. Consequently, investigation of the acquisition of inflec-
tional morphology comparing Chinese and English, as well as
other alphabetic languages, may allow us to better understand
the challenge allomorphs pose for English-speaking children.
Acquisition of Derivational Morphology
While the acquisition of inflectional morphology by Eng-
lish-speaking children well underway by the age of 4 and ma-
jor inflectional principles are usually acquired by the early ele-
mentary grades, the acquisition of derivational morphology
begins later and involves a longer developmental course. First
graders usually have only rudimentary knowledge of derived
forms, far less than their knowledge of roots and inflected
forms (Anglin, 1993). It is usually not until third or fourth
grade that children start to develop somewhat more explicit
awareness of the structure and meaning of derived forms
(Anglin, 1993; Carlisle, 2000; Tyler & Nagy, 1989), and such
awareness continues to develop through the high school years
(Mahony, 1994; Nagy, Diakidoy, & Anderson, 1993).
Several factors may influence the rate of acquisition of
different types of morphology. First, inflectional and
derivational morphology differ in the number of suffix types
and in the frequency of the suffixed forms (Mahony et al.,
2000). Whereas inflections involve only a small number of
high-frequency grammatical suffixes (e.g., -ing, -ed, -s),
derivational suffixes (e.g., -able, -ment, -ize) are larger in
number and derived forms have relatively lower frequency,
especially in oral language. Secondly, derivational morphol-
ogy usually involves complicated alteration in phonology
and semantics, whereas the alteration in inflectional mor-
phology is more transparent (Mahony et al., 2000).
Gordon (1989) conducted one of the first studies of fac-
tors that influence the acquisition of different types of mor-
MORPHOLOGICAL AWARENESS AND READING 165
phology. He argued that the acquisition of morphology is de-
termined by two factors: productivity and constraints. “Pro-
ductivity” refers to the extent to which stems and affixes can
be combined to form words. “Constraints” refer to restric-
tions on productivity. For example, Darwinianism is accept-
able in English, but Darwinismian* is not (asterisk indicates
“made-up” word).
The ideas of productivity and constraints were integrated
in the level-ordering model that Gordon (1989) created to ex-
plain differences in the acquisition of derivational and inflec-
tional morphology. In this model, word formation processes
are assigned to one of three levels within the lexicon. Level 1
processes are first, then Level 2, and finally Level 3. Level 1
includes irregular inflections (e.g., mice, geese) and non-neu-
tral derivational affixes, which causes phonological alter-
ation in the stem (e.g., -ion, -ity). Level 2 processes involve
neutral derivational affixation, which does not alter the pho-
nological form of the stem (e.g., -er, -ness). Another differ-
ence between neutral and non-neutral suffixes is that the se-
mantic relation between stem and suffix of neutral
derivatives is usually more transparent. And finally, Level 3
includes regular inflections. The three levels of processes dif-
fer not only in terms of their order of application, but also in
terms of their productivity. Level 1 processes are the least
productive, having the most limited range of applicability,
whereas Level 3 processes are the most productive.
Using an untimed lexical decision task, Gordon (1989)
found that the rate of acceptance of affixed words from all three
levels increased from age 5 to age 9. However, within each age
group, the acceptance rate for low frequency words with high
frequency stems was greatest for complex words formed
through Level 3 processes, followed by complex words
formed through Level 2 processes, and then Level 1 processes.
Gordon (1989) not only found a difference in the rate of acqui-
sition of inflectional and derivational morphology, but also
was able to explore finer distinctions, showing how productiv-
ity, phonological alteration, and semantic transparency may
affect the order of acquisition of derivational morphology. His
findings are consistent with studies documenting young chil-
dren’s use of novel language. Almost all the derived forms ob-
served involved Level 2 processes while there were no in-
stances of Level 1 affixes (Clark, 1981, 1982; Clark & Clark,
1979; Clark & Hechet, 1982). Gordon’s (1989) findings sup-
port Clark and Cohen’s (1984) claim that words formed
through productive word formation rules are easier for chil-
dren to remember and such rules are acquired prior to less pro-
ductive word formation rules.
According to Gordon (1989), productivity is the determin-
ing factor in the rate of morphology acquisition in English.
However, his methods did not enable him to address directly
how semantic and phonological factors contribute differently
to the acquisition of inflectional and derivational morphology,
because in English semantic transparency is confounded with
productivity at Levels 2 and 3, and phonological neutrality is
confounded with productivity across all three levels.
166 KUO AND ANDERSON
Recently, Fowler, Feldman, Andjelkovic, and Oney (2003)
attempted to disentangle semantic and phonological factors
from productivity by studying the development of morphologi-
cal awareness among Serbian-speaking children and Turk-
ish-speaking children. In these two languages, both inflections
and derivatives are productive. The two languages, however,
differ in terms of phonological alteration involved in inflec-
tional and derivational processes. In Serbian, derivationally-re-
lated pairs are less phonologically predictable than inflection-
ally-related pairs, whereas in Turkish, phonological alterations
involved in derivation and inflection are equivalent.
Fowler et al. (2003) assessed morphological awareness in
sentence completion tasks. As in studies of English-speaking
children, Serbian- and Turkish-speaking children performed
better on inflectional items than derivational items. This dif-
ference cannot be explained in terms of productivity because,
as mentioned earlier, both inflections and derivations are
common word formation processes in the two languages.
Fowler et al. (2003) hypothesized that vocabulary knowledge
would be more closely associated with awareness of deriva-
tions than awareness of inflections. However, in both lan-
guage groups, vocabulary knowledge was strongly related to
both types of morphological awareness.
To explore the role of phonological predictability in the
acquisition of morphology, Fowler et al. (2003) examined the
partial correlation between performance on the morphologi-
cal production tasks and performance on the phoneme dele-
tion tasks, after controlling for vocabulary knowledge. In the
Serbian-speaking sample, this partial correlation was signifi-
cant only with derivational items where a phonological
change to the stem was required. For the Turkish-speaking
sample, phoneme deletion accounted for comparable
amounts of variance in derivational and inflectional items.
As mentioned earlier, in Serbian, derivationally related pairs
are less phonologically predictable than inflectionally related
pairs, whereas in Turkish, phonological alterations involved
in derivation and inflection are equally systematic. Fowler et
al. (2003) inferred that phonological predictability might
play a more central role than semantic relatedness in the ac-
quisition of different types of morphology.
Although Fowler et al. (2003) demonstrated the relative
importance of phonological and semantic factors involved in
the acquisition of Turkish and Serbian, one should be cau-
tious in generalizing their findings to the acquisition of mor-
phology in other languages, such as English. More research
needs to be done to study whether productivity overpowers or
interacts with phonological and semantic factors in the acqui-
sition of morphology of other languages.
Three Major Aspects of Awareness of
Derivational Morphology
Derivational morphology generally involves more compli-
cated relational, syntactic, and distributional knowledge than
inflectional morphology (Tyler & Nagy, 1989). Relational
knowledge refers to the ability to recognize the stem of mor-
phologically complex words and understand the relationship
between the stem and the suffix. Syntactic knowledge is con-
cerned with the insights into the alteration of part-of-speech
produced by derivational suffixes. Distributional knowledge
refers to the understanding of how affixes are constrained by
the syntactic category of the stems they attach to. Various tasks
have been developed to assess children’s knowledge of these
three aspects of derivational morphology.
Relational knowledge. A common task to assess rela-
tional knowledge is the “comes from” task first proposed by
Derwing (1976). In this task, children are presented with a
pair of words and are asked whether the second word comes
from the first word (e.g., “Does the word player come from
the word play?”). Another is the segmentation task that asks
children to identify the stem in a derived word (Casalis &
Loui-Alexandre, 2000). Grade level effects of relational
knowledge assessed with these two tasks have been found in
English-speaking children (Carlisle, 2000; Ku & Anderson,
2003; Mahony et al., 2000), French-speaking children
(Casalis & Louis-Alexandre, 2000), and Chinese-speaking
children (Ku & Anderson, 2003) ranging from second to
sixth grade. However, these tasks seem to be limited in some
respects. First, the segmentation task taps into children’s
awareness of the structure of morphologically complex
words, which might not reflect their understanding of the re-
lations between stems and derived words. In fact, Carlisle
(2000) found in her study with third and fifth graders that
performance on the segmentation task was not correlated
with the ability to define morphologically complex words.
Secondly, the morphological knowledge assessed by the “co-
mes from” task can be confounded with vocabulary size and
general world knowledge. For example, a child may say that
teacher comes from teach simply because he or she under-
stands the meaning of the two words and knows that they are
semantically related without seeing the morphological con-
nection between them. Thus, without a control for vocabu-
lary size or general world knowledge, this task may yield a
biased measure of morphological knowledge.
A more reliable task may be the multiple-choice task de-
veloped by Tyler and Nagy (1989). They target low-fre-
quency words with high frequency stems. Children read a
sentence containing the target word and were asked to
choose the best interpretation of the sentence among four
options. Because the target word was unknown and its
meaning could not be determined from the context, a child
needed to utilize relational knowledge to recognize the
stem. Tyler and Nagy (1989) found that fourth graders had
already developed some relational knowledge, and it con-
tinued to increase up to eighth grade.
Whether phonological neutrality has an effect on the ac-
quisition of relational knowledge of derivatives has been in-
vestigated (e.g., Jones, 1991; Carlisle, 2000). Notably,
Mahony et al. (2000) divided non-neutral items into four cat-

egories: a) stress-shift and vowel change (e.g., parent pa-
rental); b) vowel change (e.g., deep depth); c) consonant
change (e.g., associate association); and d) silent letter
(e.g., sign signature). Consistent with Tyler and Nagy
(1989), phonological neutrality did not result in a higher stem
recognition rate. In fact, the recognition rate of the neutral
items was the second lowest among the five categories. Find-
ings from these studies suggest that phonological neutrality
is likely to play only a minor role in the acquisition of knowl-
edge about the relational aspect of derivatives.
Syntactic knowledge. Derivational morphemes en-
code information about part-of-speech. Using a definition
task, Freyd and Baron (1982) and Wysocki and Jenkins (1987)
both found that even eighth graders had difficulty understand-
ing the syntactic information encoded in derivational suffixes.
However, these investigators might have underestimated chil-
dren’s knowledge of the syntactic role of derivational suffixes
because the definition task requires a higher metalinguistic de-
mand. It is possible that eighth-graders understood the syntac-
tic contribution of derivational suffixes but were unable to ex-
press it explicitly in formal definitions. To avoid this possible
confounding factor, later studies generally have used a sen-
tence completion task following Berko (1958). Pseudowords
are usually employed to minimize the possible confounding
with vocabulary size. Syntactic knowledge has also been as-
sessed in a judgment task, in which children are asked to judge
the grammaticality of sentences containing derivatives with
suffixes marking an appropriate or inappropriate syntactic cat-
egory (Nagy et al., 1993; Singson et al., 2000, Experiment 2).
The three variations of the task attempt to tap into the same as-
pect of knowledge of derivational morphology but vary in
terms of cognitive and metalinguistic demands. The produc-
tion task is the most difficult one, and the judgment task is the
least demanding.
Knowledge about the syntactic properties of derivatives
does not develop until formal literacy instruction begins
(Berko, 1958). Tyler and Nagy (1989) argued that fourth
grade may be the point when children become able to recog-
nize the syntactic properties encoded in derivational suffixes.
Awareness of the syntactic information in derivatives in-
creases with grade level from mid-elementary grades upward
and does not seem to approach ceiling even by eighth grade
(Carlisle, 2000; Nagy et al., 1993; Singson et al., 2000; Tyler
& Nagy, 1989).
A consistent pattern that emerges from existing research
on the acquisition of syntactic aspects of derivational mor-
phology is that non-neutral items are more challenging than
neutral items (Carlisle, 2000; Fowler & Liberman, 1995;
Leong, 1989; Tyler & Nagy, 1989). Furthermore, good and
poor readers differ on their performance on non-neutral items
but not on neutral items (Fowler & Liberman, 1995;
Shankweiler et al., 1995). These findings have led some to ar-
gue that phonological awareness may be critical in the acqui-
MORPHOLOGICAL AWARENESS AND READING 167
sition of morphological knowledge (e.g., Fowler &
Liberman, 1995; Fowler et al., 2003).
However, an alternative interpretation that cannot be ruled
out from the existing findings is that phonologically
non-neutral derivatives may be more difficult simply because
they are low in frequency. In other words, the observed dif-
ference in performance on the neutral and non-neutral items
could be due to an unbalanced frequency distribution rather
than a phonological factor. Unlike inflections, the phonologi-
cal shifts involved in derivation are usually not
phonotactically governed, although they are not entirely idio-
syncratic either. Many of the phonological shifts involved in
derivatives follow form-related patterns and these form-re-
lated families vary in size (e.g., reduce reduction, produce
production, induce induction; parent parental, orient
oriental). If it is found that the difficulty in producing
non-neutral derived items varies as a function of family size,
then probably frequency, rather than phonological neutrality,
is a more influential factor in the ability to produce derived
forms. Future research needs to address the potential con-
found of frequency and phonological neutrality.
Distributional knowledge. The most challenging as-
pect of derivational morphology is perhaps the understand-
ing of how affixes are constrained by the syntactic category
of the stem to which they attach. For instance, -ly attaches to
adjectives but not to nouns, so beautifully is fine in English
while beautyly is not. The acquisition of distributional
knowledge is supposed to lag behind the acquisition of rela-
tional and syntactic knowledge, because without being able
to recognize the stem in a complex word or differentiate dif-
ferent syntactic categories, one can hardly see the distribu-
tional constraints on derivational suffixes.
Tyler and Nagy (1989) found that discrimination of
well-formed derivatives increased with grade level. Accep-
tance of ill-formed neutral derivatives increased from fourth to
sixth grade but dropped at eighth grade. This inverted U-curve
suggests that the sixth graders went through an
overgeneralization period when they recognized the existence
of the some distributional rules but were not yet able to identify
the range of application. This developmental pattern was also
observed in a cross-language study of English- and Chi-
nese-speaking children at second, fourth, and sixth grades by
Ku and Anderson (2003). They found that second and fourth
graders in both language groups did not perform significantly
above chance in distinguishing well-formed and ill-formed
derivatives, which suggests that distributional knowledge may
not be acquired until the late elementary grades.
Acquisition of the Morphology of Compounds
Compared with the research on the acquisition of inflectional
and derivational morphology, the acquisition of compounds
has received relatively less attention. Berko (1958) assessed
children’s awareness of compounds by asking them to provide
168 KUO AND ANDERSON
explanations of compound words, such as Thanksgiving and
blackboard. Very little awareness of compounds was observed
in preschool and first-grade participants in her study. How-
ever, this may have been due to the fact that some of the items
(e.g., Friday, handkerchief, breakfast) were so lexicalized that
their structures are opaque even to adults. Furthermore, some
of the items had very high surface frequency (e.g., airplane,
holiday, sunshine) but low component frequency. When chil-
dren do not know the meaning of the component words, they
are likely to store the whole compound as a single lexical entry
without seeing its internal structure. Because of the problems
with the test items, Berko (1958) may have underestimated
children’s awareness of compounds.
The problems with items in Berko’s study were over-
come in a series of studies of Hebrew-speaking children’s
acquisition of compounds by Clark and Berman (1987).
They used novel compounds composed of words familiar to
children. They found that from age 4 upward, He-
brew-speaking children could almost always identify the
head of a compound noun. Even in the demanding com-
pound production task, children at age 5 were able to give a
correct response 75% of the time.
Given the consistency in the position of the head of com-
pound nouns in English, one might generalize from Clark
and Berman’s (1987) study that English-speaking children
will have grasped major noun compounding rules by first
grade. However, Nagy et al. (2003) found that at-risk sec-
ond-grade readers performed only slightly above chance
level in identifying novel compound nouns and at-risk fourth
graders were only 72% correct. This suggests that poor read-
ers might still struggle with noun compounding rules in the
early-and mid-elementary grades.
In a cross-language study of Mandarin- and English-speak-
ing children at second, fourth, and sixth grades, Ku and Ander-
son (2003) used three tests to assess awareness of compounds.
One test asked children to select the best interpretation of
low-frequency compounds composed of high-frequency base
words. Another asked children to distinguish between well-
and ill-formed compounds. The third was an odd-man out task
that examined relational knowledge of compounds, that is,
whether children understand that a shared part of a word may
have different meanings. For example, the –room in mushroom
is different from the –room in bedroom or classroom. Grade
had significant effects on each of the three tests in both lan-
guage groups. Furthermore, in each grade Mandarin-speaking
children outperformed English-speaking children in com-
pound awareness. This difference was attributed to the fact that
compounding is a far more productive word formation process
in Mandarin than in English.
Although compounding is a highly productive word forma-
tion process in Mandarin (Packard, 2000), most of the research
done on the acquisition of Mandarin compounds so far has fo-
cused only on the development of relational knowledge and
knowledge about the headedness of compound nouns (Ku &
Anderson, 2003; Li et al., 2002; McBride-Chang, Shu, Zhou,
Wat, & Wagner, 2003; Nagy, et al., 2002). Zhang (2004) made
a first attempt to explore Mandarin-speaking children’s aware-
ness of the structures of different types of compounds, such as
coordinative compounds, subordinate compounds, sub-
ject-predicate compounds, verb-object compounds, and com-
pounds with a verb/adjective complement. Children were
asked to select a word from three stimuli to match the structure
of a target word. For example, the target word is [sao3 di4]
sweep the floor ([sao3] means sweep and [di4] means floor).
The three choices are [qiao1 da3], knock and beat ([qiao1]
means knock, [da3] means beat); [xiu1 xi2], take a break (a sin-
gle morpheme word); [da3 qiu2], play ball ([da3] means play
and [qiu2] means ball). The correct answer for this item is play
ball, because it has the same verb-object compound structure
as the target word, sweep the floor. Despite the preponderance
of compounds in Mandarin, Zhang (2004) reported that Man-
darin-speaking children in second grade had little mastery of
different compounding structures, and even the performance
of sixth graders was far from ceiling.
An unanswered question in the acquisition of compounds
is how it interacts with the development of phonological
awareness. As with inflections and derivatives, compounding
may involve phonological shifts. This might not pose an ad-
ditional problem for English-speaking children, because the
only phonological shift involved in English compounds is
stress placement within compound nouns with modifiers
(e.g., black board vs. bláckboard). New consonant clusters
formed through compounding are generally allowed in Eng-
lish (Hammond, 1999). For example, although /kp/ is not an
acceptable consonant cluster in any single-morpheme in-
flected or derived word, it is allowed in compounds such as
checkpoint and stockpile. However, phonological alteration
is quite common in German compounds. For example, the fi-
nal /n/ in verbs is usually dropped in verb-noun compounds
(e.g., wandern (walk) + der Weg (way) → Der Wanderweg).
The German noun-noun compounding involves more com-
plicated phonological shifts, such as the supplementation of a
consonant (e.g., der Schirm gegen die Sonne (the umbrella
against the sun) → der Sonnenschirm) or the omission of a fi-
nal vowel (e.g., die Kirche (church)+ der Turm (tower)→ der
Kirchturm), and so forth. Thus, for German-speaking chil-
dren, the development of compound awareness might be as-
sociated with sensitivity to phonological assimilation rules.
Ability to produce [Verb–Object Noun] compounds might
also be related to the development of phonological awareness.
Duanmu (2000) pointed out that the word order for [Verb–Ob-
ject Noun] compounds is primarily determined by syllable
count and not by semantics or syntax. When the verb is
disyllabic, the object must precede it rather than follow it. This
pattern has been observed in Mandarin as well as in English.
For example, Mandarin speakers say hsiao1 [sharpen] (verb)
qian1–bi3 [pencil] (object) ji1 [machine] (noun), but
shu1–ca4i [vegetable] (object) chu3 –li3 [process] verb ji [ma-
chine] (noun). English speakers say break (verb) neck (object)
speed, but vegetable (object) processing (verb) machine. In

both languages, when the verb contains two or more syllables,
it is fronted before the object to form the modifier for the head
noun. It is likely that the ability to form acceptable [Verb–Ob-
ject Noun] compounds is related to some aspect of phonologi-
cal awareness, such as syllable count.
In summary, the general trend that emerges from the exist-
ing literature is that awareness of inflectional and compound
morphology usually develops earlier than the acquisition of
derivational morphology. While the awareness of inflectional
and compound morphology appears to develop prior to the
beginning of formal literacy instruction, knowledge about
derivational morphology usually does not emerge until
mid-elementary grades. The acquisition of major inflectional
rules is generally completed by early elementary grades, but
awareness of compound and derivational morphology con-
tinues to develop through the elementary grades or even later.
The acquisition of morphology is influenced by linguistic
factors, such as the productivity of the word-formation rules,
the semantic transparency of the relations between the com-
ponents of the complex forms, and the degree of phonologi-
cal alteration involved in the word formation process.
METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES IN
ASSESSING MORPHOLOGICAL AWARENESS
Conclusions about the role morphological awareness plays in
literacy development are contingent upon valid methods. Un-
fortunately, some methodological limitations have persisted
in the literature. In this section, we will point out common
methodological limitations in assessing morphological
awareness and provide suggestions for improvement.
Distinguishing Vocabulary Size and
Morphological Awareness
Vocabulary size is highly correlated with morphological
awareness in children learning various languages (e.g.,
Fowler & Liberman, 1995; Fowler et al., 2003; Ku & Ander-
son, 2003; McBride-Chang et al., 2003; McBride-Chang et
al., 2005) and is one of the major confounding factors that
need to be considered in assessing morphological awareness.
Without considering this factor, it is hard to attribute success-
ful performance on a morphological awareness task to the
ability to see the internal structure of test words. For exam-
ple, a child may select adventurous as the best answer in a
sentence completion task, not because he or she sees that ad-
venturous is composed of a root adventure and an adjective
suffix –ous, but because he or she simply knows the meaning
of the word adventurous as a whole.
At least four approaches have been employed to take care
of the potential confound of vocabulary in assessing morpho-
logical awareness. First, a vocabulary assessment can be in-
cluded as a covariate (e.g., Feldman et al., 2003; Mann &
Singson, 2003). Second, steps can be taken to assure that the
MORPHOLOGICAL AWARENESS AND READING 169
components of complex words are familiar to children (e.g.
Ku & Anderson, 2003). Third, pseudowords can be used to
rule out an effect from root word familiarity (e.g., Berko,
1958; Tyler & Nagy, 1989). A fourth way to discount vocabu-
lary familiarity is to incorporate a baseline test (e.g., Nagy et
al., 1993; Tyler & Nagy, 1989).
Of the foregoing methods, the least satisfactory is em-
ploying a vocabulary assessment as a covariate, because, as
we will detail later, there is an intrinsic relationship between
morphological awareness and vocabulary size. Hence, re-
moving the variance on a vocabulary assessment removes
some—or much—of the expected relationship between mor-
phological awareness and reading. Covarying on vocabulary
should be used only as an adjunct to other methods (e.g., Ku
& Anderson, 2003).
Distinguishing Syntactic Awareness and
Morphological Awareness
An assumption underlying many of the studies is that the par-
ticipants have completed the development of syntax. Without
this assumption, knowledge about the syntactic contribution
of derivational suffixes would be confounded with syntactic
awareness, which refers to the “ability to reflect on and ma-
nipulate the order of words in a sentence” (Nagy & Scott,
2000, p. 275). For example, it would be uncertain then
whether a child fails to produce adventurous in “The trip
sounded ____” because he or she does not realize an adjec-
tive needs to be filled here or because he or she does not un-
derstand that –ous converts a noun into an adjective.
Although developmental psycholinguists generally agree
that children grasp the core syntax of their language by age 6
(e.g., Brown, 1973; Crain & Thornton, 1998; McKee,
McDaniel, & Snedeker, 1998), it does not necessarily follow
that children can perform perfectly on syntactic awareness
tasks by this age. The stage theory of the development of
metalinguistic awareness (Gombert, 1992; Valtin, 1984)
summarized earlier suggests that the ability to explicitly ma-
nipulate linguistic units and reflect upon linguistic rules in
the abstract usually lags behind linguistic performance in
rich communicative contexts. Some studies have looked at
children’s development of syntactic awareness (e.g., Gaux &
Gombert, 1999; Rego & Bryant, 1993; Tunmer, 1990;
Tunmer, Nesdale, & Wright, 1987), but the available findings
do not allow us to pinpoint when children reach a ceiling
level in performing syntactic awareness tasks. Future re-
search needs to disentangle awareness of the syntactic contri-
bution of derivational morphology from syntactic awareness.
Decoding Ability and Short-Term Memory as
Possible Confounds
Morphological awareness tasks are usually administered
orally to minimize potential interference from lack of decod-
ing ability (see Carlisle, 2003). Avoiding printed stimuli is
170 KUO AND ANDERSON
crucial when relating morphological awareness tasks to de-
coding ability, because otherwise the examined relationship
is simply between two versions of a decoding task.
However, performing metalinguistic tasks orally may
make greater demands on short-term memory, which is an-
other potential confounding factor (see Mann & Singson,
2003). Two solutions have been proposed in the literature.
One is to lower the demand on short-term memory by con-
verting a sentence completion task or a multiple-choice task
into a grammatical judgment task (e.g., Singson, Mahony, &
Mann, 2000, Experiment 2). For example, instead of asking
children, “She is not very A. activation, B. activity, C. active,
and D. activate. Which one is correct?”, simply ask them,
“She is not very activity. Does this sound right?” Of course,
many more sentence verification items are required to
achieve the same level of reliability as a multiple-choice task.
Another way to handle the trade-off between decoding
ability and demand on short-term memory is to provide a
written version of the test and read the questions aloud to the
children (e.g., Carlisle, 2000; Singson et al., 2000, Experi-
ment 1). This increases the validity of the test, but seeing
complex words in print may facilitate or impede identifica-
tion of the stems. Some researchers have attempted to rem-
edy this problem by excluding complex words that involve
orthographic shifts (e.g., Carlisle & Stone, 2003). However,
this creates bias because some types of items are systemati-
cally discarded. Perhaps a better way to handle the trade-offs
between decoding ability, demands on short-term memory,
and possible confounds from orthographic representations is
to provide children a written version of the test without the
target morphologically complex words and read aloud the
complete version of the test.
Given that morphological awareness is intimately inte-
grated with other aspects of linguistic competence and
metalinguistic abilities, it may be impossible to obtain a pure
measure of morphological awareness. However, with appro-
priate task design and statistical analysis, it should be possi-
ble to better take care of some major confounding factors.
MORPHOLOGICAL AWARENESS AND
READING DEVELOPMENT
As mentioned in the introduction, the reasons for believing
that morphological awareness will be closely related to read-
ing are that a) it provides a more general index of
metalinguistic ability; b) the adult mental lexicon is morpho-
logically organized; and c) many writing systems represent
morphological as well as phonological information. In this
section we first review empirical studies that address whether
awareness of inflections, derivatives, and compounds weigh
differently for reading development across different age and
language groups and the extent to which the relationship is
mediated by factors such as phonological and orthographic
awareness. Finally, we review theoretical frameworks that
have been put forward to account for the relationship be-
tween morphological awareness and learning to read.
Awareness of Inflectional Morphology and
Learning to Read
Although the first formal experimental study on children’s
awareness of inflectional morphology by Berko (1958) was
dated in the late 1950s, the relationship between morphologi-
cal awareness and learning to read was not explored until a
decade later by Brittain (1970). Using Berko’s sentence com-
pletion test, Brittain (1970) assessed awareness of inflections
of first and second graders and examined whether inflec-
tional awareness was related to reading achievement. He
found a significant partial correlation between inflectional
performance and reading achievement after intelligence was
controlled. Furthermore, the correlation was stronger for the
second graders than for the first graders.
In Brittain’s (1970) study, reading achievement was a
combined measure of word reading (decoding skill) and
reading comprehension. Later studies usually have separated
the two measures, which may matter because decoding and
comprehension probably involve different aspects of
metalinguistic insight. Decoding is a graphophonological
skill that involves the ability to convert graphemes to sound
but may not necessarily require access to meaning. On the
other hand, reading comprehension by definition requires ac-
cess to meaning, not only meaning encoded in individual
words, but also meaning encoded in the way individual
words are strung together.
Awareness of inflectional morphology may make differ-
ent contributions to word reading and reading comprehen-
sion. This was shown by Müller and Brady (2001) in a
study with first grade Finnish-speaking children.2 They
found that performance on inflectional morphology tasks
accounted for significant variance in reading comprehen-
sion and decoding speed after vocabulary size was con-
trolled. However, when phonemic awareness was entered
into the equation, performance on inflection tasks still ac-
counted for significant variance in reading comprehension
but not in decoding speed. This suggests that awareness of
inflectional morphology makes a contribution to compre-
hension but not to decoding skill.
The correlation between awareness of inflectional mor-
phology and reading achievement seems to be limited to the
early elementary grades (Brittain, 1970; Carlisle &
Nomanbhoy, 1993; Casalis & Louis-Alexandre, 2000; Müller
& Brady, 2001). Very little research has looked at the relation-
ship between inflectional performance and reading achieve-
ment beyond second grade. This may be because the acquisi-
tion of major inflectional rules is usually completed by early
2Finnish is a highly agglutinated language with a complex inflection
system of 16 cases.

elementary grades (e.g., Berko, 1958; Anisfeld & Tucker,
1968; Derwing & Baker, 1979). The lack of variance in mea-
sures of inflectional knowledge beyond second grade renders
them poor indicators of general morphological awareness for
children in mid-elementary grades and upward.
The underlying mechanism that links awareness of inflec-
tional morphology and reading development of beginning
readers is left unexplained in the literature. It remains unclear
a) whether awareness of inflectional morphology helps chil-
dren to better decode morphologically complex words; and
b) whether knowledge of inflectional morphology is utilized
in text reading to facilitate comprehension. Without clarify-
ing these questions, it can be argued that the observed rela-
tionship between the awareness of inflectional morphology
and reading achievement simply reflects the fact that begin-
ning readers who are attentive to linguistic details such as in-
flectional morphology are also likely to have a disposition to
read more carefully. To rule out this alternative interpreta-
tion, one could manipulate the morphological complexity of
the test items on word reading and reading comprehension
and examine whether performance on these tests will vary as
a function of awareness of inflectional morphology.
Awareness of Derivational Morphology and
Learning to Read
Awareness of derivational morphology is perhaps the most
widely studied aspect of morphological awareness in reading
research and is usually considered to be a general indicator of
morphological awareness. Its importance in reading develop-
ment has been shown in studies comparing good and poor
readers (Champion, 1997; Fowler & Liberman, 1995; Leong,
1989; Shankweiler, et al., 1995).
Fowler and Liberman (1995) used two production tasks to
compare the awareness of derivational morphology of good
and poor readers from first to third grade. Children were
asked to produce a derived form of a base word or a base form
of a derived word to complete a sentence. For both the deriva-
tive production task and the base production task, two types
of target words were included: neutral derivatives that do not
change the phonology of the base and non-neutral derivatives
that involve phonological alteration of the base. The two
types of target words were matched in terms of frequency.
The results showed that good readers outperformed the poor
readers on non-neutral items, but there was no group differ-
ence in performance on the neutral items.
Fowler and Liberman (1995) argued that the weakness in
morphological awareness of poor readers may stem from
their weakness in phonological awareness. This argument
was supported by Shankweiler et al. (1995), who found that
although non-neutral items were more difficult for both good
and poor readers, the poor readers were affected more by
non-neutrality than good readers. Furthermore, they found
that the variance in word reading accounted for by phonolog-
ical awareness when it was entered after morphological
MORPHOLOGICAL AWARENESS AND READING 171
awareness was greater than the variance accounted for by
morphological awareness and when phonological awareness
was entered into the equation first.
The effect of phonological neutrality on performance of
morphological tasks appears to vary with age. Champion
(1997) conducted an experiment similar to that of Fowler and
Liberman (1995) with an older group, that is 10- and
12-year-old children, and obtained a different result. Poor
readers performed more poorly on the morphological aware-
ness task than good readers, but they were not more affected
by neutrality than good readers. The absence of the neutrality
effect in Champion (1997) suggests that the source of reading
problems with older reading-disabled children may be more
morphological in nature and less dependent on a weakness in
phonological awareness. Yet the effect of neutrality still
emerges in some finer measurements of morphological pro-
cessing. Leong (1989) conducted a study with children in
grade 4, 5 and 6 using the same experimental design later em-
ployed by Fowler and Liberman (1995). Leong measured re-
action times as well as accuracy and found that good readers
responded significantly faster than poor readers in producing
the stem of a derived word or a derived form of a stem.
Although studies comparing good and poor readers have
highlighted the importance of morphological awareness in
reading development, one needs to be cautious because of
some general limitations of these studies. First, except for
Shankweiler et al. (1995), none of these studies has taken into
account factors such as general intelligence or vocabulary in
the comparison of good and poor readers. Without including
either of these two variables as a covariate in the analysis, one
may argue that the observed difference in morphological
awareness between good and poor readers is a byproduct of
general intelligence or vocabulary size. Whether morphologi-
cal awareness makes an independent contribution to reading
development remains a question of debate in these studies.
The second limitation concerns the role of phonological
awareness in performance on neutral and non-neutral items.
Although items were matched in terms of frequency in
these studies, the scope of application of the word forma-
tion rules for neutral suffixation and non-neutral suffixation
was not considered. According to the level-ordering theory
discussed earlier, non-neutral suffixation rules usually have
a more limited range of applicability than neutral
suffixation rules. Studies have shown that word formation
rules that have a narrower range of applicability are usually
acquired later (e.g., Clark & Cohen, 1984). With this find-
ing as a backdrop, one may argue that the difference be-
tween good and poor readers on neutral and non-neutral
items arises from the scope of the word formation rules
rather than a difference in phonological awareness. In other
words, we cannot rule out the possibility that poor readers
are slower in acquiring low-frequency derivative formation
rules rather than being impeded by a phonological deficit.
Another approach to studying the role of morphological
awareness in reading development is to have a within-group
172 KUO AND ANDERSON
design and use multivariate statistical methods. This approach
has several advantages. First, phonological awareness can be
included in the equation to examine its contribution to reading
relative to morphological awareness or to see whether it varies
as a function of morphological awareness. Secondly, unlike
the between-group design, where good and poor readers are
distinguished with a composite measure of decoding and com-
prehension, the within-group design allows one to examine the
contribution of morphological awareness to comprehension
and to decoding separately. Most of the studies using this ap-
proach have either vocabulary or general intelligence as a
covariate (e.g., Carlisle & Nomanbhoy, 1993; Casalis &
Louis-Alexandre, 2000; Mahony et al., 2000; Singson et al.,
2000; Mann & Singson, 2003).
Until recently, studies that attempted to investigate how
morphological awareness is related to reading development
usually measured the ability to decode both real words and
nonwords (e.g., Carlisle, 1995; Carlisle & Nomanbhoy, 1993;
Casalis & Louis-Alexandre, 2000; Mahony et al., 2000;
Singson et al., 2000). Results from these studies suggested that
morphological awareness makes only a limited contribution to
decoding skills in early elementary grades after other decod-
ing-related factors are considered. The tenuous relationship
between awareness of derivational morphology and word
reading may be attributable to the somewhat problematic de-
sign of including nonwords or single-morpheme words in the
decoding test. When investigating the relationship between
phonological awareness and decoding, it may not matter
whether the test items are morphologically complex or not (al-
though length itself can make items more difficult for begin-
ning readers). Including nonword items even has the advan-
tage of controlling extraneous factors such as vocabulary size.
However, the rationale for expecting a strong relationship be-
tween morphological awareness and decoding of nonwords
and, perhaps, single-morpheme words is questionable, be-
cause decoding such items does not require insights into mor-
phological structure. In fact, intervention studies have shown
that morphological awareness training does not have any sig-
nificant effect on reading nonwords (e.g., Arnbak & Elbro,
2000). Therefore, it is not surprising that most of the variance
in nonword and single-morpheme decoding tests is explained
by phonological awareness whereas morphological aware-
ness makes a very limited contribution.
More recent research on the relationship between mor-
phological awareness and word reading has shifted attention
to the decoding of morphologically complex words (e.g.,
Carlisle, 2000; Carlisle & Fleming, 2003; Carlisle & Stone,
2003; Mann & Singson, 2003; Nagy, Berninger, & Abbott,
2006). According to the metalinguistic framework proposed
at the outset of this review, the ability to decode morphologi-
cally complex words is a type of graphomorphological
awareness because it requires the ability to coordinate ortho-
graphic and morphological cues to achieve the correct pho-
nological representation. Morphological awareness should
play a more prominent role in decoding morphologically
complex words because it helps beginning readers to parse
strings of letters at the right syllable boundary (e.g., mis-han-
dle vs. mi-shandle). Moreover, as pointed out by Verhoeven
et al. (2003) and Nunes, Bryant and Olsson (2003), many of
the seemingly inconsistent grapheme-phoneme conversion
rules in English and Dutch (and perhaps other alphabetic lan-
guages as well) are in fact morphologically governed. For ex-
ample, the –ive sequence at the end of English words has one
pronunciation when it functions as a derivational suffix, as in
detective or effective, but has a different pronunciation when
it is an integral part of a morpheme, as in arrive or contrive.
Carlisle (2000) made an initial attempt to investigate the
relationship between morphological awareness and decoding
of morphologically complex words. She included in her de-
coding test several sets of morphologically complex words
that were matched on base frequency but differed in phono-
logical neutrality and surface frequency. For both third grad-
ers and fifth graders, phonologically non-neutral items (e.g.,
reduce reduction) were more difficult than phonologically
neutral items (e.g., replace replacement) and performance
on the low surface frequency items was significantly poorer
than performance on the high frequency items. Because the
base words had high frequency, the finding suggests that by
mid-elementary grades, children are still not able to effec-
tively utilize morphological cues to parse an unfamiliar word
containing a familiar base. Awareness of derivational mor-
phology, as assessed in sentence completion tasks, was found
to have a weak relationship with word reading. At both grade
levels, the only significant correlation was between perfor-
mance on the phonologically non-neutral items in the
derivational task and performance on the decoding of
non-neutral items. Carlisle’s (2000) study marks a significant
milestone in understanding the relationship between mor-
phological awareness and word reading.
The unique contribution of morphological awareness to
word decoding has been found to increase with age. Casalis
and Louis-Alexandre (2000) found that morphological
awareness accounted for significant decoding skill variance
among French-speaking second-graders but not among first
graders. Carlisle and Stone (2003) reported that for
third-graders, syllable length, but not base frequency, con-
tributed significantly to speed and accuracy of decoding mor-
phologically complex words; for fifth graders, both syllable
length and base frequency accounted for a significant vari-
ance. The finding suggests that fifth graders are better able
than third graders to capitalize on morphological cues to de-
code morphologically complex words. In a similar study, but
with vocabulary controlled, Mann and Singson (2003)
showed that by fifth grade, the best predictor of decoding
morphologically complex words is morphological aware-
ness, not phonological awareness. Nagy et al. (2003) found
that for fourth and fifth graders, the contribution of morpho-
logical awareness to decoding of morphologically complex
words was most salient when the words involved phonologi-
cal shift. According to their structural equation model, while

word decoding ability alone was the best predictor of decod-
ing of morphologically complex words that did not involve
phonological shift, word decoding ability and morphological
awareness jointly contributed to the decoding of morphologi-
cally complex words that involved phonological shift.
So far, only a handful studies have examined the relation-
ship between awareness of derivational morphology and
reading comprehension. Casalis and Louis-Alexandre (2000)
found that for French-speaking first-graders, morphological
awareness did not make any significant contribution to read-
ing comprehension, but for second-graders, morphological
awareness accounted for 35% of the variance in comprehen-
sion beyond the contribution of IQ and vocabulary. A similar
pattern was revealed in Carlisle (2000) with English-speak-
ing children. For the third graders, morphological awareness
explained 43% of the variance in reading comprehension,
and for the fifth graders, the variance explained increased to
53%. However, because neither vocabulary nor phonological
awareness were taken into account in Carlisle’s (2000) analy-
ses, the unique contribution of morphological awareness may
have been overestimated.
Putting aside some methodological flaws in the literature,
the developmental pattern that emerges from studies on read-
ing comprehension is consistent with what appears in re-
search on word reading: The importance of morphological
awareness to reading development appears to increase with
age. Most of the research on morphological awareness and
learning to read has used word decoding as an indicator of
reading achievement. The probable explanation for this
methodological decision is that word decoding is easy to
measure and highly correlated with reading comprehension
among beginning readers (e.g., Siegel, 1993). However, the
relationship may be less robust for intermediate readers.
Among beginning readers, the greatest challenge in reading
is to convert graphemes into phonological representations
and map them onto oral vocabulary. Comprehension follows
readily from successful decoding because primer texts are
written with words children know from oral language. How-
ever, intermediate readers encounter a greater number of
morphologically complex words in written text. These are
less common in oral language. Thus, for intermediate read-
ers, successful decoding does not guarantee comprehension.
Following this line of reasoning, the ability to identify the
stem in unfamiliar words and to understand the contribution
of suffixes should become increasingly important for reading
comprehension beyond the beginning level.
Awareness of Compound Morphology and
Learning to Read
It was not until recently that awareness of the morphology of
compounds has been investigated in relation to learning to read
(e.g., Ku & Anderson, 2003; Li et al., 2002; Nagy et al., 2003;
McBride-Chang et al., 2003; McBride-Chang et al., 2005).
MORPHOLOGICAL AWARENESS AND READING 173
Many of these studies were conducted with children learning
Chinese, which is a language rich in compound morphology.
McBride-Chang et al. (2003) is the one study that investi-
gated the independent contribution of compound awareness
to the word reading of Chinese children. Cantonese-speaking
kindergarteners and second-graders from Hong Kong com-
pleted two morphological awareness tasks that assessed abil-
ity to parse and construct compound words. In the Morpheme
Identification Test, a child was presented with three pictures
that were orally labeled by the experimenter. The three labels
shared one syllable that differed in meaning. The child was
then presented with a target word that contained the common
syllable and needed to point to the picture representing the
same morpheme as the one in the target word. In the Morpho-
logical Construction Test, a child was asked to create new
compounds for novel objects or concepts based on previ-
ously acquired morphemes (e.g., “If we see the sun rising in
the morning, we call that a sunrise. What should we say when
we see the moon rising in the evening?” The expected answer
is moonrise.) All the test items on the Morphological Con-
struction Test were compound nouns. The word reading test
consisted of single-character words and two-character words
of increasing difficulty. Compound awareness predicted 9%
of the unique variance of word reading in the kindergartner
sample and around 3% of the unique in the second-grade
sample, beyond the variance explained by other reading-re-
lated measures, including vocabulary, phonological aware-
ness, and processing speed. McBride-Chang et al. (2003) ar-
gued that flexibility in dealing with morphemes is helpful as
“Chinese children map meanings from oral language to Chi-
nese characters” (p. 749).
The relationship between awareness of compounds and
decoding of Chinese characters found in McBride-Chang et
al. (2003) parallels findings from research on English-speak-
ing children’s word decoding. However, the theoretical basis
for a direct linkage between compound awareness and char-
acter recognition was left unaddressed in their study. Recent
research on the relationship between morphological aware-
ness and word reading has specified that morphological
awareness facilitates the decoding of morphologically com-
plex words, because in many languages syllable boundaries
in morphologically complex words are morphemically influ-
enced (e.g., Carlisle, 2000; Mann & Singson, 2003).
Decoding single-morpheme characters obviously does
not require Chinese children to have insights into the mor-
phological structures of compounds. The extent to which
compound awareness may contribute to the decoding of
two-morpheme words in Chinese may also be limited, be-
cause unlike English, syllable boundaries in Chinese are
clearly marked in the orthography and not determined mor-
phemically. It could be, though, that a child with more ad-
vanced homophone awareness has a greater chance of mak-
ing a correct guess when he or she could only decode one
character from a two-character word because he or she
knows the possible combinations of meanings of the decoded
174 KUO AND ANDERSON
character. The underlying mechanism that links awareness of
the morphology of compounds and decoding of Chinese
characters should be addressed more explicitly in future re-
search. In the meantime, whether compound awareness
makes a contribution could be partially answered with the
data collected by McBride-Chang and her colleagues in an
item analysis comparing the one-morpheme two-character
words with the two-morpheme two-character words. Other
character-decoding measures should also be included in the
analysis to see whether the contribution of morphological
knowledge would be overpowered by factors such as the
awareness of the role of the phonetic parts of characters (e.g.,
Shu, Anderson, & Wu, 2000).
Holistic Studies of Morphological Awareness and
Reading Development
The studies reviewed so far in this section have examined the
relationship between awareness of a single type of morpho-
logical knowledge and reading development. Several recent
studies have taken a more holistic approach and included as-
sessments of different types of morphology, which may re-
veal a more comprehensive picture of the relationship be-
tween morphological awareness and reading achievement.
In a study with second-grade at-risk readers and
fourth-grade at-risk writers, Nagy et al. (2003) constructed
three morphological awareness tests that assessed children’s
abilities to a) complete sentences with suffixed words; b)
judge the well-formedness of compounds and c) judge the
morphological relatedness of word pairs. This study distin-
guishes itself from previous studies in that it not only takes
into account phonological awareness and vocabulary, but
also orthographic awareness to examine how all these read-
ing-related factors along with morphological awareness are
jointly related to reading achievement. Results from the
structural equation modeling show that for the second-grade
at-risk readers, morphological awareness made a significant
unique contribution to reading comprehension. For the
fourth-graders, although there was a strong correlation be-
tween morphological awareness and reading comprehension,
none of four reading-related factors alone accounted for a
significant unique variance in reading comprehension. Nagy
et al. (2003) argued that as reading skill develops, children
may have to coordinate several metalinguistic abilities and
multiple sources of linguistic information to achieve compre-
hension. It should be noted that their findings should not be
treated as contradictory with the studies that revealed an in-
creasingly important role of morphological awareness in
reading achievement (e.g., Carlisle, 2000; Casalis &
Louis-Alexandre, 2000). Instead, Nagy et al. (2003) high-
lights the importance of including orthographic awareness in
examining the relationship between morphological aware-
ness and reading achievement, which is an exceptionally
promising area for future research.
Cross-linguistic research on the relationship between
morphological awareness and reading achievement should
provide valuable insights because it can help to “make the fa-
miliar strange, calling our attention to features of our own
language that we otherwise take for granted” (Anderson &
Li, 2006). Two recent studies, Ku and Anderson (2003) and
McBride-Chang et al. (2005), have attempted cross-language
comparisons. In Ku and Anderson’s (2003) study with sec-
ond-, fourth- and sixth - grade Mandarin- and English-speak-
ing children, both awareness of compounds and awareness of
derivational morphology were assessed in four morphologi-
cal awareness tests. The first principal component scores
were used as an overall indicator of participants’ morpholog-
ical awareness. Ku and Anderson (2003) found that for both
language groups, morphological awareness accounted for a
significant amount of variance in reading comprehension be-
yond the amount accounted for by vocabulary knowledge.
They hypothesized that Mandarin-speaking children should
benefit more from insights into morphological structure in
reading than English-speaking children because the Chinese
writing system a) involves fewer phonological and ortho-
graphic shifts in forming morphologically complex words
than English and b) has more homophones than English. This
hypothesis was weakly supported in their data.
Recently, McBride-Chang et al. (2005) conducted a
cross-linguistic study comparing the literacy development
of second-graders from China, Hong Kong, Korea, and the
United States. Besides morphological awareness, a number
of other reading-related factors, such as phonological
awareness, vocabulary, and speeded naming, were also as-
sessed. The tasks for assessing phonological and morpho-
logical were “indigenously derived in different cultures” (p.
15). The phonological awareness tasks for all language
groups included syllable deletion and phoneme deletion.
The morphological awareness task for the Chinese and Ko-
rean groups required children to form novel compounds for
novel objects or concepts based on morphemes familiar to
them. The morphological awareness task for the Eng-
lish-speaking children included 14 items on novel com-
pound construction and 6 items on sentence completion
with inflected words. Structural equation models fit to the
data showed that for the two Chinese-speaking groups,
morphological awareness, but not phonological awareness,
significantly predicted word reading (one- and two-charac-
ter word decoding) after controlling for vocabulary and
speeded naming. For the Korean group, performance on
both morphological awareness and phonological awareness
made a significant contribution to word reading. And, for
the English-speaking children, phonological awareness, but
not morphological awareness, contributed significantly to
performance on the Woodcock-Johnson III Test of Achieve-
ment (letter recognition and word decoding).
McBride-Chang et al. (2005) concluded that the relative
importance of phonological awareness and morphological
awareness to reading development is script-dependent.

Although McBride-Chang et al.’s (2005) findings are con-
sistent with existing research on the relative contribution of
phonological awareness and morphological awareness to
reading achievement (for a review, see Anderson & Li,
2006), a caveat is that the pattern of findings may have been
an artifact of the methods. The association between phono-
logical awareness and word reading may have been
downplayed for the Chinese-speaking groups because aware-
ness of syllables and phonemes were assessed, but not rhyme
awareness, which has been reported to be a stronger phono-
logical predictor of word recognition in Chinese (Ho &
Bryant, 1997). The weak association between morphological
awareness and reading in the English-speaking group may be
attributable to the fact that awareness of compounds and in-
flections had little to do with letter recognition, which was
part of the decoding test.
Cross-language research is challenging in that a number
of theoretical and methodological considerations need to be
juggled within a single study. Despite some weaknesses in
design, the pioneering cross-language research provides
stepping-stones for future research in the field.
Does Morphological Awareness Cause Growth
in Reading?
The assumption underlying most studies is that morphologi-
cal awareness is a contributing cause of reading develop-
ment. However, neither the studies comparing good and poor
readers nor the studies using a within-group design and re-
gression analysis license a causal conclusion. At least four
relations may exist between morphological awareness and
reading development. In addition to morphological aware-
ness being a contributing cause, the relationship could be re-
versed: Extensive exposure to print may lead to better mor-
phological awareness. A third possibility is that the
relationship between morphological awareness and learning
to read is reciprocal. And finally, morphological awareness
and reading development may not have a direct relationship
with each other, but co-vary with another factor.
Longitudinal studies can satisfy several entailments of a
causal relationship, notably, that the purported cause pre-
cedes the purported effect. Studies suggest that among Eng-
lish-speaking children (Carlisle, 1995) and French-speaking
children (Casalis & Louis-Alexandre, 2000) morphological
awareness in preschool and first grade is a strong predictor of
second-grade and even third grade reading comprehension
(Carlisle, 1995; Carlisle & Fleming, 2003; Casalis &
Louis-Alexandre, 2000).
Intervention studies provide the gold standard for the
evaluation of causation, because a well-designed experimen-
tal intervention study has the potential to corroborate all of
the entailments of a causal argument, namely: a) the pur-
ported cause precedes the purported effect; b) when the pur-
ported cause occurs, the effect follows; c) the effect does not
happen unless the cause occurs; and d) in a true experiment,
MORPHOLOGICAL AWARENESS AND READING 175
or well-controlled quasi-experiment, the relation between the
purported cause and purported effect is unlikely to be due to
another co-varying factor. Findings from intervention studies
generally support the view that morphological awareness en-
tails better reading development, although exceptions do ex-
ist. Most morphological training studies have involved chil-
dren of mid-elementary grades and focused on the
identification of root morphemes and affixes. Generally, chil-
dren who receive training show improved reading compre-
hension (Danish speaking-children: Arnbak & Elbro, 2000;
Elbro & Arnbak, 1996; English-speaking children: Henry,
1989, 1993). Morphological training may even benefit youn-
ger children. Lyster (2002) found in a longitudinal study with
Norwegian-speaking kindergarteners that morphological
training not only had an immediate effect, but also a
long-term effect on reading achievement.
In an intervention study with English-speaking fifth grad-
ers, however, Baumann, Edwards, Boland, Olejnik, and
Kame’enui (2003) found that the group trained in morphol-
ogy did not outperform the control group on a reading com-
prehension test, nor on a word definition task that assessed
their ability to infer the meanings of morphologically com-
plex words. Baumann et al. (2003) speculated that a reason
that their training program failed to be effective was that they
focused only on affixes but did not teach children how to
identify the stems in morphologically complex words, which
is the morphological skill that has been reported to be most
related to reading development in elementary grades (Fowler
& Liberman, 1995). Further analysis of the types of mistakes
children in the experimental group made on the definition
task yielded support for their speculation. The children in the
experimental group produced responses that were affix-con-
sistent but not stem-consistent. For example, “loca again” for
relocation, “not able” for undesirable.
A recent intervention study by Nunes et al. (2003) with 7-
and 8-year-old English-speaking children stands out in its
theoretical approach and methodology. Sessions in the
12-week intervention included activities such as classifica-
tion (e.g., classifying words into grammatical categories,
such as verbs, nouns, and adjectives), analogical reasoning
(e.g., sing: singer; magic: ?), and morpheme blending (e.g.,
choosing between un- or dis- to form the negative of a given
stem word), which goes beyond the emphasis on the seman-
tics of the morphemes and may promote children’s knowl-
edge about the relational and syntactic, as well as distribu-
tional, properties of derivational morphology. The
post-intervention word-reading test was designed to assess
children’s ability to utilize morphological rules in decoding.
The items included real words and pseudowords whose sylla-
ble boundaries or pronunciations are morphemically deter-
mined (e.g., detective: [tiv] vs. [tæiv]; uninverted,
unishaped). Nunes et al. (2003) found that the group that re-
ceived morphological training outperformed the control
group on the pseudoword items. The study not only provides
additional empirical evidence in favor of the view that mor-
176 KUO AND ANDERSON
phological awareness may be the cause of better reading per-
formance, but also suggests that morphological training may
have a positive long-term effect on reading achievement.
Positive effects of morphological instruction are not lim-
ited to alphabetic languages. Effects on reading comprehen-
sion have also been observed among Mandarin-speaking
children in intervention studies that focused on the structures
of compounds (Zhang, 2004) and in intervention studies that
emphasized the contribution of characters to the meanings of
multi-character words (Anderson, Li, & Wu, 2004; Nagy et
al., 2002). Thus, available evidence indicates that across a
range of languages morphological training can significantly
improve reading comprehension and, further, that morpho-
logical awareness may be a cause of better reading.
There has also been some evidence suggesting that the rela-
tionship between morphological awareness and reading de-
velopment might be reciprocal rather than unidirectional.
Carlisle (1988) and Templeton and Scarborough-Franks
(1985) found that orthographic representations provides valu-
able clues to morphological structure. Thus, the development
of morphological awareness may be facilitated by exposure to
print. A more direct piece of evidence challenging the view
that morphological awareness leads to better reading achieve-
ment comes from Fowler and Liberman (1995). They com-
pared the performance on morphological tasks by younger av-
erage readers and older poor readers matched on reading skill.
The results showed that the younger average readers did not
outperform the older poor readers on the morphological tasks.
This finding is in contrast with studies on phonological aware-
ness using a similar paradigm in which younger average read-
ers consistently showed an advantage over older poor readers
on phonological tasks (e.g., Bradley & Bryant, 1978; Fowler,
1990). Fowler and Liberman (1995) argued that this finding
“leaves open the question of whether morphological weak-
nesses hamper reading acquisition or whether experience with
the orthography promotes morphological sensitivity” (p.
157). Taken together, findings from Fowler and Liberman
(1995) and the longitudinal and intervention studies discussed
above suggest that the relationship between morphological
awareness and reading may be reciprocal.
Evidence in support of the position that morphological
awareness and reading development may co-vary with an-
other factor comes primarily from studies that looked at the
role phonological awareness played in the relationship be-
tween morphological awareness and reading achievement.
As discussed earlier, research has shown that the type of mor-
phological tasks that can best distinguish good readers from
poor readers are usually those that involve morphologically
complex words with phonological alteration of the stem
(Fowler & Liberman, 1995; Leong, 1989; Shankweiler, et al.,
1995). Furthermore, studies employing regression analysis
have found that the contribution of morphological awareness
usually drops substantially once phonological awareness is
considered (e.g., Carlisle & Nomanbhoy, 1993; Mahony et
al., 2000; Singson et al., 2000).
Thus, there appears to be a significant degree of overlap
between phonological awareness and morphological aware-
ness. Converging evidence from the foregoing studies has
suggested that at least for children in early elementary
grades, the development of morphological awareness is con-
tingent upon the development of phonological awareness,
and the relationship between morphological awareness and
reading development may be mediated by phonological
awareness. However, for mid-elementary students and be-
yond, the picture is somewhat different. Nagy et al. (2004)
found that morphological awareness made a unique contribu-
tion to the reading comprehension of students from fourth
grade to ninth grade, beyond that of phonological factors
such as word decoding and oral non-word repetition.
Findings from research conducted with English-speaking
children suggest that awareness of inflectional morphology is
mostly related to reading development at early elementary
grades. Beyond second grade, it is the awareness of
derivational morphology that carries weight as the general in-
dicator of morphological awareness. Although the contribu-
tion of morphological awareness to reading development
tends to be limited once phonological awareness or vocabulary
is controlled, there appears to be a developmental trend that its
importance to reading development will increase with age.
The majority of the studies reviewed in this section were
conducted with English-speaking children or children learn-
ing to read other alphabetic languages. A few recent studies
have made an initial attempt to extend our understanding of
the relationship between morphological awareness and
learning to read to languages with different orthographies,
such as Chinese or Korean. A tentative conclusion that can be
drawn from an examination of these cross-linguistic studies
is that the way morphological awareness relates to reading
development is script-dependent. However, more cross-lin-
guistic research needs to be done before we can delineate a
comprehensive framework to capture the relationship be-
tween morphological awareness and learning to read lan-
guages with different orthographies.
Studies with different designs and types of analysis have
suggested that morphological awareness is a contributing
cause of reading growth. However, the relationship between
morphological awareness and reading development cannot be
completely captured in any single simple theoretical relation.
The picture that emerges from the existing literature is that the
relationship between morphological awareness and reading
development is more likely to be reciprocal than unidirec-
tional. The relationship is mediated by the development of
phonological awareness, although the degree to which phono-
logical awareness is involved appears to decrease with age.
CONCLUSION
With a couple of qualifications, existing research supports
the conclusion that morphological awareness is strongly re-

lated to growth in reading. The first qualification is that—at
least in English and probably other alphabetic lan-
guages—morphological awareness is only weakly related to
the reading of beginners, but more and more strongly related
to reading as children pass through the beginning stages. A
plausible explanation is that for beginning readers of alpha-
betic languages, mastery of graphophonological analysis is
the first critical developmental step. At this stage, variability
in skill at graphophonological analysis seems to overwhelm
the variance attributable to morphological awareness. Once
graphophonological analysis has been mastered by most
children, and the texts they are expected to read contain more
morphologically complex words, morphological awareness
becomes increasingly important. The scant amount of avail-
able evidence suggests that morphological awareness is im-
portant for younger as well as older readers of nonalphabetic
languages such as Chinese (e.g. Li et al., 2002).
A second qualification is that morphological awareness
appears to be less important for word decoding than reading
comprehension. However, most of the studies that point to
this conclusion have been done with young readers in the
process of mastering graphophonological analysis. More-
over, some of these studies have included items in the mea-
sure of decoding that involve letter naming or pronunciation
of monosyllabic pseudowords. It is difficult to imagine any
theoretical reason why morphological awareness should fa-
cilitate performance on such items. In most studies that have
involved older children and employed tests that assess decod-
ing of morphologically complex words, morphological
awareness has accounted for a substantial amount of unique
variance in word decoding.
Morphological awareness seems to be a cause of growth
in reading, not merely a reflection of growth already attained.
The basis for this conclusion comes from longitudinal stud-
ies, showing that assessments of morphological awareness
predict reading a year or two later and, especially, interven-
tion studies, showing that instruction in morphology facili-
tates multiple aspects of reading.
However, the relationship between morphological
awareness and reading is probably reciprocal rather than
unidirectional. There is some empirical evidence to support
this conjecture, and it makes good theoretical sense. A
reader’s ability to unlock the meaning of a novel complex
word depends on the reader’s inventory of known mor-
phemes. This in turn is sure to depend, at least in part, on
volume of exposure to language, above all printed language
because of its greater density of less frequent, morphologi-
cally more complex, and semantically more transparent vo-
cabulary (Anderson, 1996; Stanovich & Cunningham,
1993). For example, the person who does not read much
probably will not be able to see the contribution of the
bound root ante- to the meaning of antecedent. In contrast,
an avid reader who previously has encountered antedate in
a somewhat informative context may have been able to par-
tition the word into ante- and the known form date and
MORPHOLOGICAL AWARENESS AND READING 177
work out the contribution of ante-, enabling him or her to
look at antecedent with different eyes.
Children acquire aspects of morphological knowledge at
different rates. The existing literature indicates that the ac-
quisition of major inflectional rules is completed by early el-
ementary grades, but that awareness of compounding and
derivational rules continues to develop through the elemen-
tary grades and beyond. The acquisition of morphology is in-
fluenced by linguistic factors, including in particular the pro-
ductivity of word-formation rules, the semantic transparency
of complex words, and the presence or absence of phonologi-
cal and orthographic shifts when complex words are formed.
Morphological awareness is a multi-dimensional concept,
intertwined with other aspects of linguistic competence, and
perhaps inevitably, therefore, it has been defined somewhat
differently by different investigators. Given the variation in
definitions of the construct and the range of methods that
have been employed in empirical research, what is surprising
is not that there are some inconsistent results, but the extent
to which findings converge. Nonetheless, further progress in
understanding the development of morphological awareness
and its relation to learning to read will depend on sorting out
the relative roles of other literacy-related factors, such as
phonological awareness, syntactic awareness, vocabulary,
decoding skills, and short-term working memory.
Cross-language research provides insights into morpho-
logical processes that would be difficult if not impossible to
substantiate in research involving a single language. Among
the studies that illustrate the value of cross-language research
is the one by Fowler et al. (2003), who attempted to disentan-
gle semantic and phonological factors from the productivity
of word formation rules by comparing the development of
morphological awareness among Serbian-speaking and
Turkish-speaking children. Inflections and derivatives are
productive in both Serbian and Turkish; however, in Serbian,
derivationally related pairs are less phonologically predict-
able than inflectionally related pairs, whereas in Turkish,
phonological alterations involved in derivation and inflection
are equivalent. The results indicated that for the Ser-
bian-speaking sample, phoneme deletion accounted for sig-
nificant variance of only derivational items involving a pho-
nological shift. For the Turkish-speaking sample, phoneme
deletion accounted for comparable amounts of variance of
both derivational and inflectional items.
Although research on morphological awareness and its re-
lation to learning to read is not yet a mature field of study,
several pedagogical implications can be drawn from existing
research. First, while authorities once recommended that
reading teachers postpone morphological instruction until
knowledge about orthographic patterns had been thoroughly
established and automated (e.g., Adam, 1990), findings from
current research suggest otherwise. Longitudinal studies
suggest—and intervention studies verify—that children can
benefit from morphological instruction during the early ele-
mentary grades (e.g., Casalis & Louis-Alexandre, 2000;
178 KUO AND ANDERSON
Nunes et al., 2003). Because morphemes are meaningful,
morphological awareness is likely to “enhance the memora-
bility of . . . orthographic patterns” (Carlisle, 2003, p. 313).
More research, however, needs to be done to pinpoint the op-
timal time to introduce knowledge about word structures. Be-
ginning readers need to learn to orchestrate a number of liter-
acy-related skills, and the curriculum must prioritize these
skills to make them manageable. Second, because morpho-
logical relations that involve phonological shift are challeng-
ing for children, greater attention probably needs to be given
to these words in morphological instruction. Many phono-
logically non-neutral words form pattern-related families,
and the spelling of a pattern often preserves morphological
information. Thus, introducing these words in families and
presenting them in print should promote awareness of allo-
morphs. Third, because studies have shown that even as late
as fifth-grade, English-speaking children have a problem
identifying stems that undergo orthographic shift in print
(e.g., Baumann et al., 2003), morphological training in Eng-
lish also needs to direct students’ attention to allographs.
To recapitulate, morphological awareness may not have a
pronounced effect on the reading achievement of beginning
readers, but its importance increases over the elementary
school years. The relationship between morphological
awareness and reading development is likely to be reciprocal
rather than unidirectional. Preliminary findings from
cross-linguistic research suggest that the development of dif-
ferent aspects of morphological awareness is language-spe-
cific, varying with the productivity of different types of word
formations in a language. The role of morphological aware-
ness in reading development may depend on the way mor-
phemes are encoded in different writing systems.
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