The relation of morphological awareness and syntactic awareness to adults’ reading comprehension: Is vocabulary knowledge a mediating variable?

Guo,Ying, Roehrig, Alysia, & Williams, Rihana S. (2011). The relation of morphological awareness and syntactic awareness to adults’ reading comprehension: Is vocabulary knowledge a mediating variable? Journal of Literacy Research, 43(2), 159-183.

The research reported here updates the historical debate about the influences of various word-level skills on reading comprehension. In this case, the study looks at the skills of adult readers, which have not been studied as much as school-age readers have, so a research gap is addressed. Previous research has established the link between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension, so that correlation was not really at issue in Guo et al’s research. Rather, they were trying to look at two other word-level factors, morphological awareness (related to knowledge of word parts such as inflections, derivatives, and compounds) and syntactic awareness (related to knowledge of a word’s grammatical properties and its place within a sentence structure). Two models, one which saw morphological awareness and syntactic awareness as indirectly related to comprehension through vocabulary, and another which indicated that those two types of awareness might be both indirectly related to comprehension through vocabulary AND directly related to comprehension in their own right, were tested. Although causality could not be inferred here, only relationships, the article presented some interesting insights about how the various skills involved in reading intertwine with one another, as well as some insights into the developmental timeline of skills, with some skills becoming more important than others as readers mature.

This article provided a good review for me about various types of reading skills and the roles they play in the reading process. It was interesting to think about how basic phonological and decoding skills, which play such a key role in early reading, gradually recede as other skills take precedence. When we are young children, if we can sound out a word in a text we are reading, we usually can recognize that word immediately (that is, if it is written in our home language). As we grow a bit older, though, mere sounding out won’t always do the trick. Increasingly, we have to look at word parts and context to figure out what a string of letters or sounds actually means. Just being able to pronounce words isn’t enough. The focus on factors other than phonological aspects of words probably really starts to gain in importance around the third grade; adult readers need a multiplicity of strategies to comprehend the texts they read.

This study (which was Guo’s master’s thesis) was informative and helpful as far as it went. The study was somewhat limited in that the sample consisted of about 150 college students who took batteries of written tests on a single occasion and who received course credit for doing so. Therefore, the data here are far from representative and are certainly not very authentic in terms of the typical adult literacy development. The authors do acknowledge these limitations fully. The study was conducted under conditions that would make the research expedient and efficient , with a ready cadre of consenting volunteers with a motive to participate, few (if any) messy contextual concerns, and a full battery of easily gathered quantitative data. In my graduate student days I thought of such studies as an “easy way out “approach that would put the author on a fast degree completion track but would have limited real-world applicability. I feel that way to some extent about this study, though for a master’s thesis it is less problematic than for a doctoral dissertation. I do hope that future studies with deeper data and more generalizable results will follow this one, since some intriguing questions were raised by the research reported here.