USING SENSITIVITY TO WORD STRUCTURE TO EXPLAIN VARIANCE IN HIGH-SCHOOL AND COLLEGE LEVEL READING-ABILITY

In this study three experiments investigate the relationship of sensit ivity to word structure to direct and indirect measures of reading ach ievement in normal high school and college students using a four-part morpheme Sensitivity Test (MST). This test assesses knowledge of the s yntactic category of common noun, verb, and adjective suffixes (Part 1 ), the ability to generalize this knowledge to novel forms (Part 2), t he ability to distinguish derivationally-related word pairs from pseud o-related word pairs (Part 3), and knowledge of how suffixes differ in their effect on syllable boundaries in the complex word (Part 4). Exp eriment 1 showed that the SAT Verbal scores of 26 undergraduates corre late significantly (p < 0.05) with Parts 2 and 4 of the MST; Part 1 sh owed ceiling effects. Experiment 2 showed that the Nelson Reading Test scores of 24 ninth-grade students correlate significantly (p < 0.005) with all parts of the MST. Experiment 3 showed a significant differen ce between means (p < 0.005) on atl parts of the MST for 26 proficient and 54 non-proficient high school readers. Results are consistent wit h the morphophonemic nature of English spelling.