Contributions of morphological awareness skills to word-level reading and spelling in first-grade children with and without speech sound disorder

摘要

Purpose: In this study, the authors compared the morphological awareness abilities of children with speech sound disorder (SSD)and children with typical speech skills and examined how morphological awareness ability predicted word-level reading andspelling performance above other known contributors to literacydevelopment. Method: Eighty-eight first-grade students-44 students with SSD and no known history of language deficiencies, and44 students with typical speech and language skills-completed an assessment battery designed to measure speech sound production, morphological awareness, phonemic awareness, letter-name knowledge, receptive vocabulary, word-level reading, and spelling abilities. Results: The children with SSD scored significantly lower than did their counterparts on the morphological awareness measures as well as on phonemic awareness, word-level reading, and spelling tasks. Regression analyses suggested that morphological awareness predicted significant unique variance on the spelling measure for both groups and on the word-level reading measure for the children with typical skills. Conclusion: These results suggest that childrenwith SSDmay present with a general linguistic awareness insufficiency, which puts them at risk for difficulties with literacy and literacy-related tasks.