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2014 47: 3 originally published online 12 November 2013J Learn DisabilWilliam E. Nagy, Joanne F. Carlisle and Amanda P. GoodwinMorphological Knowledge and Literacy Acquisition

  

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Introduction

An increasing body of evidence suggests that morphologi-cal knowledge is associated with important areas of literacy acquisition. Morphological awareness has been found to be correlated with vocabulary knowledge, word reading, and spelling in English and a number of other languages (e.g., Kuo & Anderson, 2006; Schiff & Raveh, 2007; Shu, McBride-Chang, & Wu, 2006). Measures of students’ knowledge of morphology account for more variance in reading comprehension than phonological awareness, which for some time was thought to be key to success in learning to read (e.g., Singson, Mahoney, & Mann, 2000). Furthermore, unlike phonological awareness, which dimin-ishes in importance after the early elementary years (Nagy, Berninger, & Abbott, 2006), morphological knowledge continues to develop across the upper elementary years (Berninger, Abbott, Nagy, & Carlisle, 2010) and beyond (Nagy & Scott, 2000; Tyler & Nagy, 1989). The contribu-tion of morphological knowledge to reading comprehension has been found to be significant when other variables have been controlled for (e.g., Jeon, 2011; Nagy et al., 2006; Roman, Kirby, Parrila, Wade-Woolley, & Deacon, 2009). Though the amount of unique variance accounted for by morphological knowledge is sometimes small, this is in part due to the high correlations between morphological knowl-edge and other predictors of comprehension; the unique variance accounted for may underestimate its relevance for instructional practice.

Findings such as these have resulted in a recent dramatic increase in researchers’ interest in instruction designed to improve students’ morphological knowledge, to the point that there have been a number of recent attempts at synthe-sis. Studies of morphology-related interventions and their effect on language and literacy development have been reviewed in Carlisle and Goodwin (2013), and there have been three meta-analyses (Bowers, Kirby, & Deacon, 2010; Goodwin & Ahn, 2010, 2013) and two narrative reviews (Carlisle, 2010; Reed, 2008).

Still, there have been relatively few studies, either descriptive or instructional, that examine the potential value of morphological knowledge for students who encounter difficulties learning to read and write. The purpose of this special issue of the Journal of Learning Disabilities is to bring to the attention of researchers and educators findings of studies on morphology and literacy that either involve students with learning difficulties or have educational implications for teaching such students. To set the stage for

509967 JLD47110.1177/0022219413509967Journal of Learning DisabilitiesNagy et al.research-article2013

1Seattle Pacific University, Seattle, WA, USA2University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA3Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA

Corresponding Author:William E. Nagy, Seattle Pacific University, 3307 Third Avenue West, Suite 202, Seattle, WA 98119-1950, USA. Email: wnagy@spu.edu

Morphological Knowledge and Literacy Acquisition

William E. Nagy, PhD1, Joanne F. Carlisle, PhD2, and Amanda P. Goodwin, PhD3

AbstractThe purpose of this special issue of the Journal of Learning Disabilities is to bring to the attention of researchers and educators studies on morphology and literacy that either involve students with learning difficulties or have educational implications for teaching such students. In our introduction, we first provide background information about morphological knowledge and consider the role of morphology in literacy, focusing on findings that are relevant for instruction of students who struggle with reading and writing. Next we present an overview of the studies included in this issue, organized by current issues concerning the role of morphological knowledge in literacy. Collectively, the articles in this issue suggest that students with weaker literacy skills tend to lag behind their peers in morphological knowledge but that all students are likely to benefit from morphological instruction. Morphological interventions hold promise, especially for students who face challenges in language learning and literacy, but additional research is needed to provide a basis for informed decisions about the design of effective morphological interventions.

Keywordsmorphology, language, literacy, instruction, learning disabilities

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4 Journal of Learning Disabilities 47(1)

the individual studies reported in this issue, we first provide background information about morphological knowledge, on the assumption that morphology continues to be an area of language unfamiliar to many. Then we consider the role of morphology in literacy and briefly review previous research, with a focus on findings that are relevant for instruction of students who struggle with reading and writ-ing. Next we present an overview of the issues and findings of studies included in this issue. Finally, we suggest ways that future research might contribute to our understanding of the relation of morphology and literacy.

Morphological Knowledge and Morphological Awareness

Morphology refers to the study of word-formation pro-cesses, including inflections, derivations, and compounds. Morphemes are defined as minimal units of meaning. For example, the word stars can be broken down into star + s, each of which has a discernible meaning (with meaning understood broadly to include grammatical function). However, stark cannot be broken down further on the basis of meaning. For example, the division star + k does not make sense in terms of meaning because the meanings of star and stark are not at all related, and -k does not function as a suffix in English. Morphological awareness is the abil-ity to reflect on and manipulate morphemes—in other words, the ability to analyze words into smaller meaningful parts such as prefixes, roots, and suffixes.

One must make a distinction between morphological awareness and the unconscious use of morphology typical of normal language processing. Very young children pro-duce overregularizations such as goed, which shows that they have gained some control over the inflectional mor-phology of English. They also routinely generate past tenses of regular verbs that they may not have heard before. However, the knowledge that enables them to do this is presumably tacit, as is most of the knowledge that

people normally use in producing and comprehending their language.

The boundary between morphological processing and morphological awareness has not often been discussed in the research literature on morphological awareness; nor is it necessarily an easy boundary to draw. Measures of mor-phological awareness necessarily draw on both. In many cases, it isn’t clear to what extent individual differences in morphological awareness reflect differences in awareness and to what extent they reflect differences in (tacit) mor-phological processing. Following Bowers and his col-leagues (2010), we will use the term morphological knowledge as a superordinate that covers morphological awareness and morphological processing (i.e., the tacit use of morphology).

The Role of Morphological Knowledge in Literacy

The potential contributions of morphological knowledge to literacy can be categorized in terms of two main distinc-tions. One is the distinction between the strategic and con-scious application of morphological awareness to new words on the one hand, and on the other hand, the largely tacit contribution of morphological processing to literacy. The second distinction is between different levels of lan-guage—word form (word identification, spelling, or decod-ing), word meaning, and syntax. How these two distinctions interface is depicted in Table 1.

At the level of word form, morphology is important for spelling and decoding because the English writing system is in part morphologically based. Though English spelling is notoriously irregular, many of the so-called irregularities are a reflection of the morphological principle, namely, that the spelling of a morpheme is often preserved even when its pronunciation has changed (Chomsky, 1970). For example, an English plural is marked with an -s even when this end-ing is pronounced -z, as in stores. Correctly spelling plurals

Table 1. Potential Contributions of Morphological Knowledge to Literacy.

Morphological Awareness(Explicit/Strategic)

Morphological Processing(Tacit)

Word form Decoding or spelling new words by analyzing them into component morphemes

Recognizing (identifying) or writing known words more quickly and easily because of stronger, redundant links between the orthographic and phonological representations of a word

Word meaning Inferring the meanings of new morphologically complex words on the basis of the meanings of familiar parts or coining a new morphologically complex word

Accessing known words more quickly because of stronger, redundant links between the form of the word and its meaning and through the knowledge that the meanings of the parts contribute to the meaning of the whole

Syntax Inferring the part of speech of a new word on the basis of a suffix or creating a new suffixed word to meet the syntactic demands of a sentence

Accessing information about the part of speech of a word more quickly because of stronger, redundant links between the form of the word and its part of speech

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requires knowing that the spelling of English plurals fol-lows a morphological rather than phonological principle—that is, that plurals are always spelled with an s, never a z, despite the fact that the latter would be more phonetically regular. The same principle applies in decoding. For exam-ple, understanding the morphological basis of the spelling of English plurals enables the reader encountering the word trays in print for the first time to determine that it is not pronounced as a homophone of trace.

Exposure to morphologically complex words contributes to an understanding of the ways that morphology is repre-sented in a given language. For example, in English, nouns and adjectives do not have grammatical gender, as they do in French. Experience with both oral and written language con-tributes to tacit recognition of familiar morphemes within words, which in turn facilitates the accuracy and speed of spelling and reading morphologically complex words (Carlisle & Stone, 2005). Furthermore, experiences reading and writing contribute to tighter links between the represen-tations of sounds, spellings, and meanings of words and morphemes (whether roots or affixes) and supports the read-ing and spelling of words in morphemic chunks. Such sup-ports can be applied in a tacit or strategic manner, depending on the reader and conditions surrounding the literacy task.

These experiences across time, particularly with unfa-miliar words made up of familiar morphemes (e.g., butter-less as in butterless popcorn), help students learn and remember pronunciations, spellings, and meanings of mor-phologically complex words and their constituent mor-phemes and in this way contribute to the quality of lexical representations in memory. The quality of a lexical repre-sentation is dependent on two factors, specificity and redun-dancy (Perfetti, 2007; Perfetti & Hart, 2002). Specificity is the extent to which the orthographic, phonological, and semantic (i.e., spelling, sound, and meaning) representa-tions of the word in memory are precise and complete. That is, one may have partial knowledge of a word such as ludi-crous at any level, for example, not knowing the spelling of the vowel in the second syllable, not knowing whether it is pronounced with a long or short u, or knowing that it is an undesirable trait but not exactly why. Redundancy is the extent to which the information in any one representation of a word is predictable from the other two. In the case of the word trays, for example, knowledge of the morphological basis for spelling plural endings in English makes the use of the letter s for the sound /z/ predictable rather than irregular. Such redundancies create stronger links between the phono-logical and orthographic forms of the word so that if the orthographic form of the word is encountered, the phono-logical form is immediately activated or vice versa (Ehri, 2005; Perfetti & Hart, 2002).

Another way morphological knowledge contributes to word recognition is through chunking, which reduces the working memory demands of reading morphologically

complex words (Zhang, Lin, Wi, & Anderson, in press). Such words (i.e., prefixed, suffixed, or compound words) tend to be long words, for which letter-by-letter decoding is not efficient. Stage models of word reading, such as Ehri’s (2005), suggest that the most accomplished students read multisyllabic words by chunking; for example, interesting can be read via morphemes (thus, two chunks: interest + ing) (as opposed to 11 grapheme-phoneme connections). Studies of reading derived words have shown that the abil-ity to read a root word (e.g., reside) tends to be related to accurate reading of a derived form of that word (e.g., resi-dence) (Goodwin, Gilbert, & Cho, 2013).

At the level of word meaning, morphological knowledge should make it easier to access, infer, and remember the meanings of morphologically complex words. Such words—whether content specific (e.g., photosynthesis) or general (e.g., analytic)—are one of the hallmarks of academic lan-guage. Nagy and Anderson (1984) estimated that 60% of the unfamiliar words that students encounter in texts from Grades 3 through 9 can be broken into morphemes that give substan-tial information about the meaning of the whole word. Through qualitative analyses of explanations of the meanings of derived words such as foundationless, Anglin (1993) found that fifth graders used morphological problem solving (i.e., inferring the meaning from analysis of the composite morphemes) more extensively and effectively than first or third graders. Root word knowledge (Pacheco & Goodwin, 2013; Tyler & Nagy, 1989) and suffix knowledge (Carlisle & Fleming, 2003; Nagy, Diakidoy, & Anderson, 1993) have been shown to contribute to knowledge of the definitions of larger morphologically complex words. As shown in Table 1, this support is hypothesized to stem from conscious morpho-logical problem solving (i.e., determining the meaning of foundationless from foundation and/or less) and from build-ing lexical representations over time (Goodwin, Gilbert, Cho, & Kearns, in press). As students come to understand why some words are spelled the way they are and why they mean what they do, stronger, more redundant links among the orthographic, phonological, and semantic representations of a word are established in their mental lexicons. Going back to the example of the word trays, knowledge of the morphologi-cal basis for spelling plural endings in English strengthens not only the links between the orthographic and phonological representations of this word but also the links between each of these and the word’s meaning.

At the level of syntax, morphological knowledge should make it easier to infer the part of speech of new morphologi-cally complex words and the syntactic patterns in which they participate. For example, words ending in -ion will tend to function as nouns and be modified by adjectives, whereas words ending in -ize function as verbs and are modified by adverbs (e.g., a sudden realization vs. suddenly realized). Knowledge of the syntactic functions of derivational suffixes may be especially important for understanding academic

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language because derivational suffixation is one of the main ways that academic language achieves its informational den-sity—for example, by condensing clauses into noun phrases (e.g., He decided to leave, and that surprised us  His deci-sion to leave surprised us; Tyler & Nagy, 1990).

All of these paths from morphological knowledge to reading or writing are likely to be relevant to students as they have occasion to use morphological knowledge in different language and literacy contexts. These paths also have impli-cations for the effects one might expect from morphological interventions since different approaches to morphological instruction will support some of these paths more than others.

The strategic, conscious use of morphological knowledge offers the promise of benefits that extend far beyond what is covered in instruction. The basic morphological insight—that words can often be broken down into smaller parts that contribute to the meaning and part of speech of the whole word—is rather simple. And the number of prefixes and suf-fixes in English is relatively small—especially if you restrict consideration to those that are reasonably productive (e.g., Baumann et al., 2002; White, Sowell, & Yanagihara, 1989). The number of morphologically complex words in the lan-guage, on the other hand, is very large—substantially greater than the number of basic words (Anglin, 1993; Nagy & Anderson, 1984). So morphological awareness might be an area where a relatively limited amount of instruction could have immediate but also far-reaching benefits for students through contributing to their ability to infer the meanings of unfamiliar, morphologically complex words and to use word structure and context to understand texts containing such words (e.g., Baumann et al., 2002; Goodwin & Ahn, 2010). The strategic use of morphological knowledge would there-fore be the most plausible account of any immediate effects of a morphological intervention on generalized measures of reading comprehension or vocabulary, and it might contrib-ute to word reading and spelling as well.

The contribution of tacit knowledge of morphology, on the other hand, is more likely to be seen in terms of increases in the depth of knowledge of words covered in instruction. Rather than memorizing definitions or spellings, students learn the reason for the spellings and meanings. For exam-ple, rather than learning cavity is a bad thing in one’s tooth, student’s learn that cavity is linked to cave, suggesting that cavity can be more accurately defined as a hole in one’s tooth. This can help students understand other uses of this word, such as a cavity within a tree where someone might hide a treasure. To the extent that morphological knowledge contributes to literacy through establishment of well-engrained links between phonology, orthography, and semantics, then, one would expect morphological interven-tions to have a positive impact on measures of comprehen-sion for texts containing the instructed words and on students’ ability to use these words in their writing. A

similar argument can be made for the role of morphology in word reading, spelling, and syntax, as shown in Table 1.

Morphology and Language-Learning Difficulties

Though we would hope for instruction to decrease the gap between students with more and less well-developed literacy skills, this certainly is not always the case. The effectiveness of specific instructional practices sometimes depends on the ability level of the student (Connor et al., 2011; Silverman & Crandell, 2010), and some types of instruction seem most beneficial for the students with the highest initial levels of ability or knowledge (e.g., Carlisle, Fleming, & Gudbrandsen, 2000; Penno, Wilkinson, & Moore, 2002). Relatively few instructional studies have focused on the benefits of mor-phological interventions for students with language-learning difficulties (but see Harris, Schumaker, & Deshler, 2011). However, some researchers have suggested that such instruc-tion might offer students with reading disabilities (particu-larly those with difficulties in phonological processing) a compensatory strategy for reading, spelling, and inferring the meaning of morphologically complex words (e.g., Casalis, Cole, & Sopo, 2004; Elbro & Arnbak, 1996).

Differences in the findings of the two recent meta-anal-yses by Goodwin and Ahn (2010, 2013) support this claim. The 2010 meta-analysis examined morphological inter-ventions for students with literacy difficulties, whereas the studies in the 2013 meta-analysis dealt with the broader student population. Both meta-analyses found significant effects of morphological interventions for morphological knowledge, phonological awareness, vocabulary, and spelling, but only the 2010 meta-analysis, which focused on students with literacy difficulties, showed a significant effect for reading comprehension, leading the authors to conclude that morphological instruction was likely to be particularly effective for children with reading, learning, or speech and language disabilities; English language learners; and struggling readers. Interestingly, the 2013 meta-analysis found morphological awareness interven-tions to be more effective for elementary students than for middle or high school students. Likewise, Bowers et al. (2010) summarized the findings of their meta-analysis study in this way: “The picture that emerges is that mor-phology instruction is particularly effective when inte-grated with other literacy instruction and aimed at less able and perhaps younger readers” (p. 167).

There are several reasons morphological interventions may be of special benefit to students with the lowest level of literacy skills. One is that morphology may serve as a means of compensating for weaknesses in phonological processes that would otherwise compromise lexical quality (Elbro & Arnbak, 1996). Fowler and Liberman (1995) sug-gested that although students with reading disabilities

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struggle in isolating, manipulating, and blending phonemes, morphological units are larger than phonemes, and they link to meaning. “Whereas phonemes distinguish between meaningful elements (e.g., p/b distinguishes pat from bat), morphemes are themselves meaningful, thereby increasing their salience. Thus, electric and electricity share a common meaningful unit in a way that pat and bat do not” (Fowler & Liberman, 1995, pp. 160–161). A related reason morpho-logical interventions might be additionally helpful for stu-dents involves automaticity. Although many strong readers might have developed strong connections between the orthographic representation and identification of the word, poorer readers may not have these well-developed lexical representations and therefore may have an even greater need for tools like morphological problem solving to iden-tify words and their meanings within texts.

However, we need to recognize that individuals with language-learning difficulties may have specific weak-nesses in morphology (Schiff & Raveh, 2007; Siegel, 2008). For example, studies have reported weaker performance by such students on measures of spelling and reading morpho-logically complex words (e.g., Berninger et al., 2008; Casalis et al., 2004; Tong, Deacon, Kirby, Cain, & Parrila, 2011). These students may therefore benefit from instruc-tion in morphological strategies that more skilled or older students may have already acquired.

Studies in This Issue

How do the articles herein extend our understanding of the relation of students’ morphological knowledge and their lan-guage and literacy development? We begin by providing an overview of the articles and then consider ways that these stud-ies address the aspects of morphological knowledge raised above. We pay special attention to the following questions:

•• At which levels of language (form, meaning, syntax) do we see a relationship between morphology and literacy abilities?

•• Do the instructional studies report gains in morpho-logical knowledge? Gains in different literacy areas?

•• What do we learn about morphological knowledge of students at different ages and with different chal-lenges in literacy acquisition? Does instruction in morphology narrow the gap between students with stronger and weaker literacy skills?

Overview of the Studies

Four of the studies in this issue use correlational or com-parative designs to examine the relationship between mor-phological knowledge and other literacy skills and student characteristics. Deacon et al. (2013) examined students with Specific Language Impairment in second to fifth

grade, exploring the link between morphology and spelling to determine whether these students showed levels of sen-sitivity to root word spelling similar to those of spelling-age matched peers. Tong, Deacon, and Cain (2013) examined whether 9- to 10-year-old poor and average com-prehenders performed differently on tasks that required analysis of morphological relations and those that required production of accurate morphological and syntactic forms of words. Gilbert, Goodwin, Compton, and Kearns (2013) studied whether word-reading skills moderated the contri-bution of morphological awareness to reading comprehen-sion. They looked at whether morphological awareness was differentially important to reading comprehension for students who had different levels of word-reading skills. Kieffer (2013) studied the extent to which morphological awareness differentiated sixth-grade students with reading difficulties from good readers and explored whether the relative contribution of morphological awareness to read-ing difficulties was different for language minority stu-dents compared to native-English-speaking students. Although our earlier discussion showed that there has been a gap in the current literature base regarding studies that have explored the potential value of morphological knowl-edge and instruction for students who encounter difficul-ties learning to read and write, together the studies in this issue begin to fill that gap, helping us to understand the role of morphology in literacy achievement for such students.

The remaining four studies in this issue report on the effects of some form of instruction in morphology for stu-dents in kindergarten through Grade 5. Focusing on links to vocabulary, Ramirez, Walton, and Roberts (2013) measured the growth in morphological awareness and vocabulary of kindergarteners who received morphology and vocabulary instruction from teachers participating in professional development workshops that focused on effective teaching strategies to accelerate early vocabulary development. Examining links to a range of literacy outcomes, Apel and Diehm (2013) reported on an intervention used in classes of kindergartners through second graders to teach the meaning and spelling of inflectional and derivational affixes. These researchers looked at the effects of this 8-week intervention on inflectional and derivational affixes on measures of mor-phological awareness, word reading, and reading compre-hension. Focusing on links to spelling, Wolter and Dilworth (2013) presented the results of an intervention for second-grade students identified as poor spellers. They compared the effectiveness of two interventions, one covering phono-logical and orthographic awareness and the other covering these and morphological awareness as well. Focusing on links to writing, McCutchen, Stull, Herrera, Lotas, and Evans (2013) reported a quasi-experimental study of a mor-phology-focused intervention embedded in a science unit on the writing of fifth-grade students; they also explored whether the intervention was effective for students at both

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lower and higher skill levels. These researchers examined whether students used more morphologically complex words in their writing, representing communication of more academically dense ideas.

At What Levels of Language Does Morphology Affect Literacy?

Perhaps because morphemes are the smallest units of mean-ing, instruction in morphological knowledge is often con-ceptualized in terms of helping students become aware of the meanings of the component morphemes in a word. Within the current issue, Ramirez and colleagues (2013) suggested that drawing students’ attention to the morphemes within compound words as part of a larger vocabulary pro-gram supports the development of morphological and vocabulary knowledge for kindergarten students. However, as discussed earlier (see Table 1), morphological knowledge should also be associated with literacy ability at the level of the word form (spelling, word recognition, and decoding) as well as at the level of syntax. The studies within this issue provide support for these hypotheses, especially at the level of word forms. Two of the intervention studies—McCutchen et al. (2013) and Wolter and Dilworth (2013)—found sig-nificant effects of morphological instruction on spelling. Two of the descriptive/correlational studies also support the idea that morphology affects literacy at the level of form. Gilbert et al. (2013) found that morphological awareness affects reading comprehension via word reading, and Kieffer (2013) found a significant difference in morphological awareness between students with and without a specific weakness in word-reading fluency.

In terms of syntax, Tong et al. (2013) explored the rela-tion of syntax and morphological awareness, finding varia-tion related to the kinds of tasks used to assess these areas of language learning. As these researchers pointed out, much more needs to be done to determine the ways in which syntactic and morphological knowledge represent separate though overlapping constructs.

Do Students Show Gains in Morphological Knowledge and/or Literacy Achievement?

A second question is whether students who participated in morphology interventions made gains in morphological knowledge and in areas of literacy. For the instructional studies, gains were found on measures of morphological knowledge and, in several cases, specifically for perfor-mance on morphologically complex words not covered in instruction. For example, in their 8-week morphological intervention for students in kindergarten and first and second grade, Apel and Diehm (2013) found significant differences favoring the treatment group for morphological awareness tasks using uninstructed words. Wolter and Dilworth (2013)

compared two interventions for second-grade students with spelling deficits; one focused on only phonological and orthographic awareness, whereas the other also included morphological instruction. They found that students in the group also receiving morphological instruction did signifi-cantly better on a nonstandardized test of spelling morpho-logical patterns that were targeted in the instruction.

In some cases, there was generalization to other literacy measures. Wolter and Dilworth’s (2013) morphological instruction group outperformed the other group not only on measures of spelling but also on a standardized measure of reading comprehension. In the study by Ramirez et al. (2013), vocabulary instruction that included emphasis on compounds resulted in larger gains on standardized vocab-ulary than would be expected from development alone.

However, the benefits of morphological instruction did not always generalize to other measures. For example, McCutchen et al.’s (2013) morphological intervention in the context of a science curriculum produced gains in a sentence-combining task that tested students’ ability to use derivational suffixation to combine clauses. In an extended writing task, students in the treatment condition used more correctly spelled deriva-tional forms of instructed words than did students in the con-trol condition, but there were no gains in overall writing fluency or in the use of noninstructed derivational forms. Similarly, Apel and Diehm’s (2013) 8-week morphological intervention for students in kindergarten and first and second grades resulted in significant gains in morphological knowl-edge, but the effects for several literacy measures—spelling multimorphemic words, sight word reading, pseudoword decoding, and reading comprehension—were not significant, and effect sizes were mostly small.

From the “glass is half empty” perspective, these four intervention studies do not present consistent, strong evi-dence that instruction in morphological awareness led to substantial gains on standardized measures of literacy skills. However, given the short duration of these interventions, the relatively small samples, and the relative difficulty of producing gains in standardized test scores, we believe that overall, the results show morphology instruction is a prom-ising area to include in literacy interventions.

What Do We Learn About Morphological Knowledge of Students at Different Grades or With Different Literacy Capabilities?

We expected different levels and kinds of morphological knowledge for students of different ages (Berninger et al., 2010)—as well as for students who have (or are at risk for) language-learning difficulties (Carlisle, 1987; Casalis et al., 2004; Fowler & Liberman, 1995; Rubin, Patterson, & Kantor, 1991; Siegel, 2008). With that said, we were interested in learning whether students with language-learning disabilities or students at risk for underachievement in literacy were

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Nagy et al. 9

especially responsive to instruction in morphology or whether descriptive studies suggest this might be the case due to a larger role for morphology in literacy achievement for such students. The studies in this issue involved participants from kindergarten through Grade 6. Six of the eight studies were conducted in schools that served predominantly students from lower socioeconomic status families. Although all of the studies provide implications for students for whom lan-guage and literacy acquisition presents particular challenges, three articles focus specifically on specific categories of lan-guage or literacy difficulties (spelling deficits: Wolter & Dilworth, 2013; Specific Language Impairment: Deacon et al., 2013; and poor comprehension: Tong et al., 2013). Additionally, Ramirez et al. (2013) examined the extent to which morphological awareness discriminated kindergarten children with weak and strong language skills, Kieffer (2013) explored the extent to which morphological awareness dif-ferentiated middle school students (including language minority students) with different reading difficulties, and Gilbert et al. (2013) examined the role of morphological awareness in supporting reading comprehension for a sample in which poor readers were overrepresented.

What evidence do we find in the studies in this issue that instruction in morphological knowledge might help close the gap between higher and lower achieving students? Three of the four intervention studies specifically addressed this question. Apel and Diehm (2013) compared the lowest 25% of the students in their sample with the remaining 75%. They found three significant differences in the gains of the two groups; two of these favored the group that was lowest in achievement at the outset. Ramirez et al. (2013) reported a significant ability level by time interaction—that is, students in the low-ability group made the largest gains in vocabu-lary. In fact, they learned more than twice as many words as students in the high-ability group. Similarly, McCutchen et al. (2013) found that the gains from their intervention were strongest for the students with the lowest pretest scores. Although Wolter and Dilworth (2013) did not compare the effects of the intervention on higher or lower achieving stu-dents, results did show that the morphological awareness intervention was effective for the students in this study, all of whom had been identified as underachieving in spelling. We consider these results encouraging. They indicate that mor-phological instruction is, at the very least, just as effective for students starting with less knowledge or more limited literacy skills and, in some cases, appears to be especially helpful for those students.

Some of the nonintervention studies also tell us some-thing about the potential benefit of morphological knowl-edge for students with reading difficulties. For example, Gilbert et al. (2013) found that morphological knowledge made a greater contribution to reading comprehension for students with lower word-reading ability than for students with higher word-reading ability, suggesting that analyzing

words into morphemes serves as a compensatory strategy for students who have trouble recognizing longer words. Though the better word readers in this study made less use of morphological knowledge, the overall strong correla-tions between morphological awareness and reading com-prehension suggest that the strategic use of morphological knowledge may be analogous to decoding ability. That is, it is an important skill to have, though one’s goal as a reader is to get to the point where one does not have to use it as often. Similarly, Deacon and her colleagues (2013) reported that students with Specific Language Impairment were as sensitive to root word spelling as their typically achieving peers, suggesting that root word knowledge may be a strength on which to build for such students. Additionally, Kieffer (2013) found that morphological knowledge dis-criminated more strongly between skilled readers and stu-dents with reading difficulties for language minority students than for students who spoke only English. This finding suggests that weaknesses in the area of morphologi-cal awareness may be more of a problem for language minority students. It is possible that morphological inter-ventions could be especially helpful for such students.

Instructional Implications and Future ResearchOverall, both the descriptive and the instructional studies reported in this issue suggest that morphological knowledge does indeed contribute to literacy achievement for students in kindergarten through sixth grade. The results confirm that, in general, students with special literacy needs perform less well than their peers on measures of morphological knowledge. However, results of the instructional studies suggest that these students benefited as much as, or in some cases more than, their peers from instruction in morphological knowledge. These results confirm and extend the findings of meta-analy-ses described above (Bowers et al., 2010; Goodwin & Ahn, 2010, 2013). The particular contribution of the studies in this issue may be adding flesh to the bones in the sense that we can see in more detail how it is that learning morphology might contribute to students’ literacy acquisition for students who struggle in learning to read and write. We can also see some issues that might be addressed in future studies.

Though morphology may seem to be a narrowly special-ized topic within the areas of literacy and learning disabilities, it is by no means a simple or homogeneous domain, as the studies in this special issue have demonstrated. There is there-fore much need for research exploring and comparing differ-ent aspects of morphology and morphological instruction.

First of all, attention needs to be given to potential differ-ences between different types of word-formation processes. The most commonly used measures of morphological awareness focus specifically on derivational suffixes, though some studies have looked at inflections (e.g., Deacon

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10 Journal of Learning Disabilities 47(1)

et al., 2013) and compounding (e.g., Ramirez et al., 2013). Few studies have measured students’ awareness of prefixes, even though instruction in prefixes is often recommended (e.g., Baumann et al., 2002; White, Power, & White, 1989). Research on phonological awareness has attempted to address the question of whether different aspects of phono-logical awareness (syllable awareness, rime awareness, and phonemic awareness) constitute a single underlying con-struct or distinct abilities (e.g., Anthony & Lonigan, 2004). Analogous research with different aspects of morphological awareness is needed. Likewise, research in morphological knowledge up to now has looked primarily at students’ abil-ity to add or remove morphemes from freestanding words. However, in middle and high school, instruction in mor-phology is likely to involve bound morphemes—Latin and Greek roots that do not constitute words in their own right (e.g., spect, struct, bio; e.g., Henry, 1989). Instruction on Latin and Greek roots may well be valuable—but the exist-ing research on morphological awareness does not, as it stands, tell us anything about this aspect of morphology.

There also appear to be important qualitative shifts in students’ knowledge of morphology across the school years (Tyler & Nagy, 1989). The studies reported in this issue—and much of the previous research on morphological aware-ness—provide us with important and informative pictures of morphological knowledge at specific grade levels; how-ever, there are few cross-sectional studies (Anglin, 1993; Nagy et al., 1993; Nagy et al., 2006; Tyler & Nagy, 1989), and even fewer longitudinal studies (Kieffer & Lesaux, 2012), examining changes in students’ growth in morpho-logical knowledge and its role in literacy. What constitutes effective instruction in morphology will depend on the grade and developmental level of the students. Therefore, another important question for future research is to deter-mine the particular features of morphological interventions that are beneficial to students at different grade levels and with different needs in literacy acquisition.

The distinction between the different levels of language at which morphological knowledge may contribute to liter-acy also deserves more attention. Morphology has often been thought about primarily as a tool for inferring the meaning of new words, but the studies in this issue have shown that morphology also contributes to literacy at the level of word form (e.g., McCutchen et al., 2013; Wolter & Dilworth, 2013). The optimal intervention for using mor-phological knowledge to improve spelling is not necessarily the optimal intervention for using morphological knowl-edge to infer the meanings of new words. More research is therefore needed to examine how morphological instruction might best be adapted to the particular outcomes desired.

The contribution of morphological knowledge to syntac-tic parsing, though demonstrably one of the roles that mor-phological knowledge plays in the comprehension of academic language (Tyler & Nagy, 1990), remains largely unexplored. Tong et al.’s (2013) exploration of syntactic

awareness and morphological awareness underlines the complexity of the relationship between these constructs.

Creating maximally effective morphological interven-tions likewise will require a better understanding of the dis-tinction between tacit versus conscious use of morphological knowledge. Though the use of the term morphological awareness highlights morphology as a strategy to be applied to new words, we have hypothesized (see Table 1) that morphological knowledge also makes a contribution to lit-eracy through lexical quality. Though the studies in this issue do not provide a test for this claim, Gilbert et al.’s (2013) results can be taken as support. They found that morphological knowledge makes the greatest contribution to reading comprehension for students with the weakest word-reading skills. A plausible interpretation of this finding is not that morphological knowledge is a maladaptive reading strategy but that its role in reading is in some ways analogous to that of phonics. Readers need to understand the writing system in order to be able to decode new words, but ulti-mately, the contribution of phonics to reading is not that read-ers continue to sound out words. However, through their ability to sound out words, they establish high-quality lexical representations with multiple redundant links between the orthographic and phonological representations of a word in memory so that they no longer need to use phonics when they encounter that word again. Likewise, morphological knowl-edge may lead to higher quality lexical representations by strengthening the links between the orthographic, phonologi-cal, and meaning representations of words and morphemes.

Finally, Bowers et al. (2010) suggested that a comprehen-sive or integrated instructional approach, in which morphol-ogy was one component, was more effective than specific instruction in morphology. Likewise, Goodwin and Ahn (2010) found that for students with literacy difficulties, mor-phological instruction as part of a more comprehensive intervention was more effective than instruction on mor-phology alone, although in their 2013 study (Goodwin & Ahn, 2013), this difference was not significant for a more general population of students. Further study of this possible model for instruction would highlight the interrelations of aspects of language and literacy. Two of the studies in this issue offer specific examples of integrating instruction in morphology with other aspects of the curriculum—Ramirez et al. (2013) making morphology one component of an inter-vention aimed at vocabulary development and McCutchen et al. (2013) incorporating morphology into a science unit. The results are promising, but more research is certainly necessary on how to negotiate the balance between attention to the details of words and language and the need for con-tent-rich instruction.

As Nunes and Bryant (2006) pointed out, “Some of the most important correspondences between spoken and writ-ten language are at the level of the morpheme. … The sys-tem of morphemes, therefore, is a powerful resource for those learning literacy” (Nunes & Bryant, 2006, p. 157).

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Nagy et al. 11

Collectively, the articles in this special issue deepen our understanding of how students with literacy difficulties might be taught to take advantage of morphological resources to support their language and literacy develop-ment. The findings also direct our attention to areas where future research could contribute further to our understand-ing of morphology as it relates to literacy acquisition and to designs of effective instruction for all students.

Authors’ Note

While William E. Nagy is the first author of this article, Joanne F. Carlisle and Amanda P. Goodwin contributed equally to its preparation. All three authors worked collaboratively and con-tributed equally with respect to the guest editorship of this spe-cial issue.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The preparation of this introduction was supported in part by Grant P50HD071764 from Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to the University of Washington.

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