Further, Nagy et al. (2006) found that morphological awareness explained
significant variation in reading comprehension independent of breadth of vocabulary,
word reading, and phonological awareness for students in fourth to ninth
grades. The morphological awareness tasks used required students to choose an
appropriate suffix and to distinguish actual morphological relationships from false
relationships (e.g., between doll and dollar). Likewise, in a 4-year longitudinal
study, Deacon and Kirby (2004) found that inflectional morphological awareness
measured in second grade predicted reading comprehension in fifth grade even once
phonological awareness and second grade reading comprehension were taken into
account. These studies suggest a theoretical basis for understanding these
relationships but also shed light on the design and analytic plan with which the
relationship between morphological awareness and reading comprehension can be
disentangled from confounding influences of phonological awareness, word reading,
and vocabulary. However, as these studies were conducted with native English
speaking students, they do not address whether this relationship holds among ELLs.