Contribution of morphological awareness to reading fluency of children with and without dyslexia: evidence from a transparent orthography

The goal of this study was to investigate the contribution of morphological awareness to reading fluency of children with and without dyslexia in a transparent orthography, such as the Greek one. The sample consisted of 256 Greek-speaking children (2^nd grade: 32 dyslexic and 105 typical readers, 5^th grade: 28 dyslexic and 91 typical readers). Morphological awareness was assessed with three tasks, examining inflectional, derivational, and compounding morphology. Reading fluency was evaluated at word, text, and silent level. The results indicated that dyslexic children both in 2^nd and 5^th grade face significant difficulties in inflectional, derivational, and compounding morphology compared to their peers. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that morphological awareness significantly contributed to reading fluency of children with and without dyslexia, after controlling for non-verbal intelligence, vocabulary, and phonological awareness. Among typical readers, results indicated that inflectional, derivational, and compounding morphology had a small but significant effect on word, text, and silent reading fluency in 2^nd grade and derivational and inflectional morphology on text and silent reading fluency in 5^th grade, after controlling for non-verbal intelligence, vocabulary, and phonological awareness. For dyslexic children, a moderate-to-large effect of inflectional and derivational morphology on text and word reading fluency was restricted to 2^nd grade. Overall, morphological skills may play a supportive role in reading fluency of Greek children in first and last elementary grades. On the other hand, for Greek children facing reading problems morphological skills appeared to have a strong role in reading fluency only in first grades. Our study provided some preliminary data for the dyslexics’ ability of morphological processing as a scaffolding skill for reading fluency. Implications of these findings for education are discussed.