Understanding prosody and morphology in school-age children’s reading

We examined the unique contributions of prosodic awareness and morphological awareness to school-aged children’s word reading and reading comprehension. A total of 110 elementary-age children from Grades 4 and 5 participated in the current study. To measure prosodic awareness, children were asked to listen to and reflect on the stress patterns of multisyllabic words and identify the syllable of the word that contained the primary stress. Two measures of morphological awareness were administered including morphological production and the nonword suffix choice task. Prosodic awareness and morphological awareness were significantly correlated in the low to moderate range. We found that both metalinguistic skills uniquely predicted word reading, and morphological awareness was the only predictor of word reading that also explained individual differences in reading comprehension. Furthermore, the relationship between prosodic awareness and word reading was partially mediated by phonemic awareness and morphological awareness, and the relationship between prosodic awareness and reading comprehension was fully mediated by morphological awareness and word reading. We conclude that prosodic awareness assessed at the word-level only affects word reading, which in turn supports reading comprehension. We also provide further evidence for the role of morphological awareness as a unique contributor to both decoding and meaning-making processes.