Morphological density and reading comprehension in Hebrew novice readers

Abstract

Hebrew allows the representation of the meaning of a few words in one dense form by using bound morphemes that linearly attach to the word. By manipulating words’ density in text, that is, decomposing them into isolated words which changes the length of the text, it was possible to check the impact of density on reading comprehension in novice readers. Each of the 292 s graders from a low SES background, of whom 79 were struggling readers (poor decoders) and the rest were typical readers, were tested in two reading comprehension tests: dense and decomposed. They also were tested in other literacy measures (word recognition, decoding, morphological awareness, vocabulary, and spelling) to learn about their reading proficiency and awareness of morphemes. The results showed a significant interaction between text type and reading ability group, while controlling for vocabulary, indicating that text density levels had varying effects on reading performance in each reading ability group. This interaction manifested as typical readers benefiting more from decomposed texts, evidenced by improved comprehension scores for these texts compared to dense texts. In contrast, struggling readers’ comprehension scores did not significantly differ between the two text types, suggesting that text density did not influence their reading performance to the same extent. Furthermore, typical readers exhibited better performance across all literacy measures, including morphological awareness. Findings suggest that a certain level of phonological decoding and morphological awareness are needed to benefit from decomposed texts. Morphological density adds another layer of difficulty for novice readers, who need to unfold the word’s structure and reveal the full meaning – a process that is assumed to be cognitively complex. They also highlight the importance of morpheme awareness in dense, morphologically complex languages like Hebrew at an early age.