Comparing English-Speaking Third- Through Sixth-Grade Students' Performances on Spoken and Written Cloze Morphological Awareness Tasks

PURPOSE: Morphological awareness, the ability to consciously think about morphemes, plays an important role in literacy achievement. Historically, when measuring morphological awareness, researchers primarily have administered tasks in the spoken rather than written modality, and few have investigated the influence of modality on task performance. Thus, the purpose of this study was to determine whether performance on cloze morphological awareness tasks would be different for English-speaking third- through sixth-grade students depending on whether the task was administered in the spoken or written modality. We also analyzed whether performance on a written version explained unique variance on measures of word-level reading and spelling after controlling for receptive vocabulary and performance on the spoken morphological awareness task. METHOD: > 150 per grade) in the United States completed cloze tasks measuring their awareness of base words and their inflected or derived forms, as well as standardized measures of real word reading, decoding, spelling, and receptive vocabulary. RESULTS: Across each grade, students performed less well on the written compared to spoken morphological awareness tasks. Performance on the spoken version was related to at least one literacy skill at each grade, and performance on the written version significantly explained unique variance on all literacy measures for each grade beyond that of receptive vocabulary and performance on the spoken cloze morphological awareness task. CONCLUSION: For children in the mid- to upper elementary grades, researchers and practitioners should consider including written morphological awareness measures, in addition to spoken morphological awareness tasks when aiming to capture the full range of morphological awareness skills needed for word-level literacy success.