Those studies conducted with native English speakers that have focused on the
role of morphological awareness in reading comprehension suggest that there is a
relationship between these skills, even when the confounding influences of word
reading skills, vocabulary, and phonological awareness are taken into account.
Carlisle (2000) found a relationship between reading comprehension and students’
performance on three tasks involving the reading of morphological complex words
among third and fifth graders. The tasks involved a test of morphological structure
in which students both decomposed and derived morphological complex words, a
test in which students read morphological complex words aloud, and a test in which
students defined morphological complex words. Although the three tests together
accounted for significant variation in reading comprehension in both third and fifth
grade, the relative contribution of the tasks varied between the grades: the
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word-reading task made the only statistically significant contribution in third grade
and the test of morphological structure made the only significant contribution in fifth
grade, after controlling for word reading. The results demonstrate that morphological
awareness might play a greater role in reading comprehension with increasing
years of schooling and the correspondingly increasing demands of texts.