Professional Documents
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A Comprehensive Definition
of Morphological Awareness
Implications for Assessment
Kenn Apel
Purpose: Although there is an increasing body of evidence for the important role morphological
awareness plays in written language development, there is little consensus on a fully specified
definition of this linguistic awareness ability. Without agreement on a definition, several problems
arise, at least one of which impacts researchers’ and practitioners’ ability to fully and consistently
assess students’ morphological awareness abilities. Method: In the first portion of this article, I
discuss insufficiencies with current definitions of morphological awareness and propose a more
comprehensive definition. Following this, I relate the implications of this new definition for
assessment: the inability of current norm-referenced tests and experimenter-designed tasks to meet
the definition and considerations from the research to keep in mind about stimuli on morphological
awareness tasks. Conclusion: In the final segment of the article, I provide implications and
suggestions for practitioners who wish to assess morphological awareness in a comprehensive
manner, using the new definition as a guide to measure students’ morphological awareness abilities.
Key words: assessment, morphological awareness, reading, spelling, written language
197
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198 TOPICS IN LANGUAGE DISORDERS/JULY–SEPTEMBER 2014
deserves as much attention for the role it plays level of detail (see Table 1 for examples).
in reading and spelling development as does Although many definitions involve some varia-
phonemic awareness (e.g., Berninger, Abbott, tion of the notion of the conscious awareness
Nagy, & Carlisle, 2010). of, or an ability to manipulate, morphemes,
Given the importance of morphological they differ in whether they specify modality
awareness for written language development, (i.e., some specify spoken only), vary in
it would seem that a consensus definition emphasis on individuals’ ability to reflect on
of morphological awareness must exist; how- morphemes, and, as a whole, do not address
ever, this is not the case. Without agreement all aspects of morphological awareness.
on a definition, several problems arise, some What is missing from all current definitions
of which impact the assessment of morpho- is the full level of specificity that might guide
logical awareness, as well as the scientific re- researchers and practitioners in evaluating
porting of researchers’ findings of this skill. In students’ morphological awareness abilities
the first portion of this article, I discuss insuf- comprehensively. Indeed, without an inclu-
ficiencies with current definitions of morpho- sive definition of a skill such as morphological
logical awareness and propose a more com- awareness, one cannot comprehensively as-
prehensive definition. Then, in the second sess that skill. Furthermore, because of
portion of this article, I relate the implications the lack of specificity in these definitions,
of this new definition for assessment. Specif- incomplete and, in some cases, incorrect data
ically, in the second section, I discuss the in- have been used to draw conclusions about
ability of current norm-referenced tests and students’ morphological awareness abilities.
experimenter-developed tasks to assess the For example, most researchers who have
construct represented by the proposed defi- assessed students’ morphological awareness
nition. I also offer considerations on the basis abilities have administered tasks in the spoken
of the research to keep in mind about stim- mode. When researchers have used tasks that
uli on morphological awareness tasks. I con- involved written language, they frequently
clude the article with implications and sug- have read the items to the students and asked
gestions for practitioners who wish to assess the students to respond orally. This is appar-
morphological awareness in a comprehensive ently based on the rationale that any written
manner. responses would be affected by the students’
(potential lack of) orthographic knowledge,
DEFINING MORPHOLOGICAL confounding the assessment of students’ mor-
AWARENESS phological awareness. This is an interesting
perspective, given that, as mentioned previ-
Morphemes are the smallest units of ously, part of morphological awareness nec-
meaning in our language. Thus, the term essarily involves an understanding of written
“morphological awareness” implies an morphemes, what they look like orthograph-
awareness of these small units of meaning. ically, how they are spelled, and how they
Given that morphemes occur in spoken and attach to base words and roots. When this
written language, morphological awareness aspect of morphological awareness is not as-
necessarily involves an awareness of both sessed, then a complete picture of students’
spoken and written morphemes, including morphological awareness abilities is lacking.
an understanding of what written affixes There also has been some confusion
(i.e., prefixes and suffixes) look like or- between the concepts of morphological
thographically and the rules that govern awareness and morphological production,
how affixes attach to base words or roots. sometimes referred to as morphological
Unfortunately, current definitions used by knowledge. Morphological awareness is a
researchers and authors come up short in conscious reflection on morphemes. Morpho-
defining morphological awareness at this logical production involves the unconscious
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A Comprehensive Definition of Morphological Awareness 199
Definition of
Researchers Morphological Awareness
use of morphemes, typically during spon- language impairments and not on morpholog-
taneous spoken language. When individuals ical awareness (i.e., with the goal to increase
converse, they produce morphemes but typ- the children’s ability to consciously consider
ically do not think actively about the mor- or think about morphemes). An inconsistent
phemes they are producing. Mature writers definition, then, led to introduction of data
also may write without thinking actively about into both systematic syntheses that was in-
the specific morphemes they are writing, par- consistent with the purposes of the reviews.
ticularly when engaged in less formal writing Including them thus had the potential to al-
situations, such as notes, e-mails, and the like. ter the outcomes of the reviews and related
In the past, however, researchers have not conclusions. An agreed upon comprehensive
always kept these two notions distinct. For definition of morphological awareness may re-
example, two investigations by Tyler, Lewis, duce such problems in the future.
Haskill, and Tolbert (2002, 2003) were incor- Assessment of morphological awareness
porated into separate recent syntheses of mor- also hinges on a complete and unified defi-
phological awareness interventions—a sys- nition. The definitions used by others have
tematic review (Bowers et al., 2010) and a been incomplete. I recommend that a more
meta-analysis (Goodwin & Ahn, 2013); how- comprehensive definition of morphological
ever, the two studies conducted by Tyler awareness is needed that acknowledges mor-
et al. (2002, 2003) were focused on interven- phology in both spoken and written modal-
tions to increase the production of spoken ities. Such an all-encompassing definition
morphemes in preschoolers with speech and would allow researchers and practitioners the
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200 TOPICS IN LANGUAGE DISORDERS/JULY–SEPTEMBER 2014
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A Comprehensive Definition of Morphological Awareness 201
Aspect of Proposed
Morphological
Awareness
Measure Mode Description Definition Assessed
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202 TOPICS IN LANGUAGE DISORDERS/JULY–SEPTEMBER 2014
Aspect of Proposed
Morphological
Awareness
Measure Mode Description Definition Assessed
cover all of the components of the proposed The tasks that researchers have adminis-
definition. Partially in response to these lim- tered have taken various forms, including
itations, researchers have constructed tasks production tasks, judgment tasks, blending/
that fill some of the gaps in assessing the key segmenting tasks, and analogy tasks, each
components of the proposed, comprehensive with several subvarieties. In addition, in one
definition. investigation, my colleagues and I included a
measure of children’s awareness of written af-
Experimenter-designed morphological fixes (Apel, Diehm, & Apel, 2013). I provide a
awareness tasks brief overview of each of these categories of
Different researchers have used different tasks below.
experimenter-designed morphological aware-
ness tasks, and often just one or two tasks, Productive morphological awareness
to assess students’ morphological awareness tasks
skills. Because the focus in the literature has Some researchers have used productive
been on the more general definition of mor- morphological awareness tasks to assess
phological awareness, it is not surprising that students’ morphological awareness skills;
experimenter-designed tasks have not cov- these tasks have varied in their requirements.
ered the range of abilities identified in the The cloze procedure has been a typical
proposed comprehensive definition. I would means for assessing students’ productive
argue, then, that researchers should discuss morphological awareness abilities (e.g., Apel
their findings in a manner that acknowl- et al., 2013; Apel & Lawrence, 2011; Casalis
edges that students’ morphological awareness & Cole, 2009; McCutchen et al., 2008; Wolter
skills have been measured in an incomplete et al., 2009). For example, a common task
manner. involves providing a word, such as a base
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A Comprehensive Definition of Morphological Awareness 203
word (e.g., help), and then requiring the about the semantic and/or syntactic accuracy
student to use an inflected or derived form of of a word, often within a multiple choice
the word to complete a sentence (e.g., The paradigm (e.g., “When Ali Baba’s wife saw
Girl Scout was a great _____[helper]). The the gold coins, she was _______ speechi-
target response has varied by researchers. fied, specialized, speechmaker, speechless”;
Sometimes, the student changes a multimor- Berninger et al., 2010; Nagy et al., 2003; Nagy
phemic word into a base word (farmer. Bill et al., 2006; Nippold & Sun, 2008). These
works on a ____[farm]). Other times, the stu- types of judgment tasks have varied addition-
dent changes a base word into an inflected or ally in their presentation mode (some were
derived word (as in the aforementioned exam- spoken-only, some were spoken but also pro-
ple with helper). When the response involves vided in print) as well as stimulus type (i.e.,
a change into a derived word, the response inflectional and/or derivational items). Deriva-
may be a transparent form (tall–taller) or one tional items varied in whether they were trans-
that involves either a phonological (magic– parent or involved a phonological and/or or-
magician) and/or an orthographic shift thographic shift. Finally, as can be seen in the
(silly–silliness). Other cloze tasks have been aforementioned example of speechified, on
similar to norm-referenced tasks discussed some tasks, pseudowords were used with real
earlier (e.g., Here is one dress; Here are two affixes.
____[dresses]; e.g., Berninger et al., 2010).
Fluency tasks offer a different approach. Morphological awareness tasks
These require students to name as many involving blending or segmenting
inflected or derived forms of a base word as A few researchers have used blending
possible (e.g., act could yield action, acting, or segmenting tasks to assess students’
react, etc.). Some researcher-developed pro- morphological awareness skills (e.g., Casalis
duction tasks have included definition tasks et al., 2004; Lyster, 2002). For example,
(e.g., Apel et al., 2013; Casalis, Cole, & Sopo, Casalis et al. required their 8- to 12-year-old
2004; Jeon, 2011; Tsesmeli & Seymour, 2006). students to blend and segment base words
To elicit productions of definitions, for exam- and their affixes to either create or decom-
ple, Casalis et al. required their 8- 12-year-old pose, respectively, a multimorphemic word.
students to finish sentences with a derived An example was blending the French base
form that completed a definition (e.g., “a word nettoie and the suffix age to produce
person who paints is a . . . ..painter”). Finally, nettoyage. In another segmenting task, they
some experimenter-designed production required their students to pronounce the base
tasks require students to read (e.g., Carlisle, portions of multimorphemic words produced
2000) or spell multimorphemic words (e.g., by the experimenters (e.g., producing the
Apel et al., 2012; Kirk & Gillon, 2009). base jour from the French word journeée).
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204 TOPICS IN LANGUAGE DISORDERS/JULY–SEPTEMBER 2014
are asked to complete the fourth component they may be measuring different aspects of
of the analogy after hearing either three morphological awareness that constitute a
words (e.g., mess: messy, fun: _____) or three multifactorial construct. Some indirect evi-
sentences (e.g., Peter plays at school: Pe- dence suggests that the latter is true; that is,
ter played at school; Peter works at home: that the different tasks used actually may be
_____________). The studies using word measuring different aspects of morphological
analogies have varied in whether the response awareness.
required an inflected or derived word (e.g., For example, two research teams examined
Kirby et al., 2012; Roman et al., 2009); all whether the morphological awareness tasks
investigations using sentence analogies have they used in their study related to one an-
required only inflected words (e.g., Bryant other and found only moderate correlations
et al., 1997). (r values ranged from .46 to .58; Deacon
et al., 2013; Ramı́rez, Chen, & Pasquarella,
A task involving identification 2013). In addition, in the study by Apel
of written affixes et al., we found that certain morphological
Finally, my colleagues and I conducted an awareness tasks predicted early elementary
investigation of children’s identification of grade students’ reading abilities better than
written affixes (Apel et al., 2013). In our other morphological awareness tasks, and
study, we provided first- and second-grade that some tasks discriminated between grades
children from low SES homes, with a paper better than others. These findings suggest
containing a list of pseudowords with real af- that not all morphological awareness tasks
fixes (e.g., rinning). The children were given measure the same aspects of morpholog-
3 min to circle all affixes (i.e., “add-ons”) they ical awareness, and that some tasks may
saw. The task allowed us to examine the stu- relate to students’ written language skills
dents’ recognition of written prefixes and suf- differently.
fixes. At the very least, no one type of task
(i.e., judgment task, production task, blend-
Morphological awareness assessment ing/segmentation task, analogy task, affix
challenges identification task) adequately assesses all of
Overall, quite a range of tasks have been the components of the proposed morphologi-
used by researchers to assess students’ mor- cal awareness definition. Before discussing im-
phological awareness abilities. As mentioned plications for researchers and practitioners, I
previously, with few exceptions (e.g., Apel first discuss other factors that impact students’
et al., 2013), most researchers have used performances on these types of measures.
only one, or perhaps two, of these tasks to When researchers have examined students’
assess students’ morphological awareness morphological awareness abilities, they have
skills. Even when some researchers have used found that several specific item features af-
multiple measures, albeit an incomplete set of fect task performance, including morpheme
tasks, to represent morphological awareness, type and transparency between base words
they then combined responses from those and their inflected or derived forms. For ex-
tasks into one composite measure (e.g., Clin, ample, in general, children in the primary el-
Wade-Woolley, & Heggie, 2009; Tong et al., ementary grades demonstrate greater aware-
2011). This can make it difficult to understand ness of inflectional forms than derivational
patterns of strengths and weaknesses. Thus, forms; it is around third grade that children
for both researchers and practitioners, it is typically demonstrate greater awareness of
unknown whether the variety of morphologi- derivational morphology (e.g., Kuo & Ander-
cal awareness tasks used across investigations son, 2006). Not surprisingly, then, inflectional
measure the same underlying construct and morphological awareness is mostly associated
can be used interchangeably or whether with literacy abilities in younger elementary
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A Comprehensive Definition of Morphological Awareness 205
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206 TOPICS IN LANGUAGE DISORDERS/JULY–SEPTEMBER 2014
Aspect of Proposed
Morphological Awareness Potential
Definition Assessed Mode Assessment Tasks Sample Item
Awareness of the morphemes Spoken Segmenting task “Tap out how many ‘parts’
in words and what they you hear in recyclable”
“sound like” (see Casalis et al., 2004).
Awareness of the morphemes Written Affix identification “Circle all the ‘add-ons” you
in words and what they task see in this list of words”
“look like” (e.g., rinning; see Apel
et al., 2013).
Awareness of the meaning of Spoken Definition task “A person who makes art is
affixes and the alterations in an . . . artist”; see Casalis
meaning they bring to base et al., 2004).
words
Awareness of the meaning of Written Suffix choice task “Matthew was not known
affixes and the alterations in for being overly [friendly,
grammatical class they bring friendship, friendliness,
to base words friends] to others” (see
Nagy et al., 2003).
Awareness of spelling of Written Spelling “Spell dresses. Spell
written affixes multimorphemic plainest . . . ..” (see Apel
words et al., 2013).
Awareness of how the addition Written Derivational spelling “Which ending goes with
of morphemes can affect task luck to make lucky: —y,
base word spellings ie, —ey” (see Sangster
and Deacon, 2011).
Awareness of the relation of Spoken Spoken relatives task “Farm. My uncle is a ____
base words to their inflected farmer. (See Apel et al.,
and derived forms 2013).
Awareness of the relation of Written Written relatives task “Shine. The boy’s bike was
base words to their inflected very ____shiny. (See Apel
and derived forms et al., 2013).
words. Students’ awareness of the spelling of logical awareness, which then will lead to spe-
written affixes and the consequences (rule cific targeted intervention goals.
affects base word changes) when attached As practitioners are using researcher-
to base words or roots can be assessed us- designed tasks, they should keep in mind the
ing multimorphemic spelling tasks (e.g., see potential factors that may influence students’
Apel et al., 2013). Finally, awareness of the performance on those tasks. As mentioned,
relationship of base words to their inflected derivational items likely will be more chal-
and derived forms also may be assessed using lenging than inflectional items. Furthermore,
spoken and written cloze tasks (e.g., teach. derivational items that involve a shift away
Mrs. Smith is my favorite ______[teacher]). from the base word, either a phonological
By using the whole range of tasks representing shift or an orthographic shift, may be more
the comprehensive definition proposed, prac- challenging than one in which the base word
titioners will have a clearer idea of students’ is transparent within the derived word. Prac-
possible strengths and weaknesses in morpho- titioners can be aware of these effects, noting
Copyright © 2014 Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. Unauthorized reproduction of this article is prohibited.
A Comprehensive Definition of Morphological Awareness 207
their impact on students’ performance and us- something different. As long as the practi-
ing that information to inform intervention tioner follows the procedures outlined by the
(i.e., if a phonological or orthographic shift publisher, the scores obtained still may be
response was more challenging for a student, compared with the normative database and
then intervention would start with stimuli standard scores obtained. The results then
that involved only transparent forms). Fur- may be interpreted qualitatively with respect
thermore, as Mitchell and Brady (2014) point to what they indicate about a student’s mor-
out, students appear to be aware of prefixes phological awareness. As with the suggestions
earlier than suffixes. Should this developmen- for the experimenter-designed tasks, practi-
tal sequence be found in assessment, practi- tioners will need to determine whether the
tioners would use this information to guide items on the norm-referenced task are im-
intervention practices as well. pacted by morpheme type (i.e., inflected or
Finally, practitioners should be aware of derived forms) and transparency of the base
norm-referenced measures they are using that word or root (i.e., transparent or shift form).
may be assessing aspects of their students’ Morphological awareness is an important
morphological awareness abilities although linguistic awareness skill that impacts the de-
the tasks are not labeled as such. Although velopment of written language: reading and
an assessment test may state that it measures spelling. With a comprehensive definition, re-
one skill, practitioners should be conscious of searchers and practitioners will be prepared
what the task truly measures. Furthermore, if to assess students’ morphological awareness
the practitioner’s work setting requires stan- skills more completely. This may enable them
dard scores for students to receive direct ser- to form a more complete and inclusive picture
vices, these assessment tasks can be used of students’ morphological awareness abilities
to assess morphological awareness even if and, if needed, develop a prescriptive, optimal
the name assigned to the measure suggests plan for intervention.
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