Brain Connection Series 6 (end)

Well, along around third grade (provided the kid is reading at grade level or above) there's a big shift in the demand on kids' reading abilities. One way to talk about it is to notice that the reading task makes an underlying assumption: the reader has sufficiently mastered phonemic awareness that she can sound out new words, and can make sense of compound words.

The way a language makes new words out of roots and additions is called morphology. More formally, Morphology is the study (and use) of a language's word structure and the rules used to form new words; more specifically, it refers to the changes wrought by small word elements that affect word meaning, such as prefixes and suffixes.

Morphology and the Connection to Reading Skills

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Other research has shown that when a word is long, especially a multisyllabic word like 'incomparable', readers tend to break the word into its affixes and its root word (in compare able). The student's ability to recognize the relationship between root words and derived words demands more from the student than automatic word recognition and has little to do with the frequency of that word—but everything to do with that student's understanding of morphemes.

In addition, there is a proven association between the ability to comprehend derivational suffixes (suffixes that not only change meaning but also often change a word's part of speech, such as the 'ful' in 'eventful') and the ability to fluently decode a word—as well as to reading comprehension in general. In fact, studies show that skilled readers fill in sentence blanks with the morphologically correct words regardless of whether the word choices are real or nonsense words; they are able to respond to the morphemes themselves and not just to familiar words.

Lastly, research on the apostrophe—which, as an unpronounced symbol, is an example of pure morphology—shows that there is no relation between students' phonological, semantic, and syntactic skills and their use of the apostrophe. Only morphological skills predict correct use of that "modern shibboleth of literacy," the much-misplaced apostrophe.

Now that you've absorbed some background information about morphology, let's take a closer look at the importance of morphology for fluent reading.

Go read the whole thing

If you are interested, go wander around the parent site . It will be worth your while.