An investigation of morphological awareness and processing in adults with low literacy

Morphological awareness, which is an understanding of how words can be broken down into smaller units of meaning such as roots, prefixes, and suffixes, has emerged as an important contributor to word reading and comprehension skills. The first aim of the current study was to investigate the contribution of morphological awareness independent of phonological awareness and decoding to the reading comprehension abilities of adults with low literacy. Results indicated that morphological awareness was a significant unique predictor of reading comprehension. A second aim of the study was to investigate the processing of morphologically complex words of adults with low literacy in both an oral reading passage and a single-word naming task. Adults’ accuracy and response times were measured on different types of morphologically complex words and compared with control words matched on frequency in both the passage and the naming tasks. Results revealed that adults were vulnerable to morphological complexity: they performed more accurately and faster on matched control words versus morphologically complex word types. The educational implications for Adult Basic Education programs are discussed.