Preschool morphological training produces long-term improvements in reading comprehension

The purpose of this study is to evaluate long-term effects on children's reading comprehension of an intervention aimed at morphological awareness. The authors present longitudinal follow-up data from children who participated in an earlier intervention study aiming at testing the effects of morphological and phonological awareness training in preschool on children's reading development. The earlier study showed that phonological and morphological training improved the children's reading ability in grade 1, whereas the children who had received morphological training showed better progress than the phonological group. The subsequent study presented here examines whether the effects found in the earlier study persist over the long term. The authors therefore evaluate the effects of the original morphological training on the children's reading ability at the end of grade 6.

In grade 1, children in the morphological awareness training group had significantly better results than children in the control group in terms of both word reading and text reading. No significant differences were found between the morphological awareness training group and the phonological awareness training group.

In grade 6, children in the morphological awareness training group had significantly better results than children in the control group in terms of reading comprehension, whereas the children in the phonological awareness training group did not differ significantly from the control group. The authors found no significant differences between the morphological awareness training group and the phonological awareness training group. According to the authors, the results suggest that early training in morphological awareness can have long-term effects on children’s literacy.

In connection with the earlier intervention study, one group of children received morphological awareness training in preschool, while a second group received phonological awareness training. A third group (control group) followed the ordinary preschool curriculum. The follow-up study reported here tested 115 of the children from the original intervention study in grade 6, including 22 children from the original phonological group, 63 from the morphological group and 30 from the control group.

The training sessions in the original intervention study lasted around 30 minutes a week for a 17-week period and were conducted by the children's preschool teachers. Training in the phonological group focussed on the sound of words and letters, whereas the morphological awareness training involved the structure of words and the different components or segments of a word (morphemes). For instance, the children worked with compound words, endings (singular-plural etc.) and derivations (such as happy/un-happy, where adding "un" in front of the word yields the opposite meaning).

Lyster, S.H., Lervåg, A.O. & Hulme, C. (2016). Preschool morphological training produces long-term improvements in reading comprehension. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal 29, 1269-1288.