Exploring Inflectional Morphological Awareness Skills in Greek-speaking Children with Poor Reading Comprehension

ABSTRACT

The study explored the inflectional morphological awareness of Greek-speaking poor comprehenders identified in grade 3. The sample consisted of 13 poor comprehenders and 27 good comprehenders. The poor comprehenders were selected from 126 children attended 19 primary schools in metropolitan area of Athens using a cut-off-based approach. All the participants completed two oral experimental tasks of inflectional morphological awareness (i.e. verb inflections and noun–adjective inflections). Noun–adjective inflection task assessed children’s ability to produce the plural of articles, adjectives and nouns in the context of a sentence. Verb inflection task required children to change the tense of the verb in a sentence. Furthermore, phonological awareness, oral receptive vocabulary, word reading and reading comprehension were measured with standardised tasks. It was revealed that the two reading groups differed in verb inflections and oral receptive vocabulary. However, poor comprehenders had well-developed noun–adjective inflections and intact phonological skills. Overall our findings lead us to suggest that in an alphabetic language with shallow orthographic system and rich morphology poor comprehenders appear to have impaired inflectional morphological awareness and impaired vocabulary. Moreover, these results suggest the significance of teaching morphological skills in improving reading comprehension. However, further research is needed to substantiate these findings.

KEYWORDS:

• Greek
• morphological awareness
• noun–adjective inflections
• phonological awareness
• poor reading comprehension
• shallow orthographic system
• verb inflections
• vocabulary

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.