Phonological awareness is thought to be related to children's success
in learning to read because it indicates an awareness of the internal
structure of words. Morphological awareness, which has been found to b
e related to reading achievement for older students, may offer a more
comprehensive measure of linguistic sensitivity because it entails not
only phonological awareness, but also other aspects of linguistic kno
wledge. The research study reported herein was designed to investigate
the extent to which phonological awareness contributes to the morphol
ogical awareness of first graders and to determine the extent to which
phonological and morphological awareness account for variance in word
reading. Two tasks of morphological awareness were used, one assessin
g judgments of morphological relations and the other assessing the pro
duction of inflected and derived forms. The children were also given t
ests of phonological awareness, vocabulary, and word reading. Results
showed that phonological awareness contributed significantly to perfor
mance on morphological awareness tasks; in addition, children with and
without phonemic awareness differed significantly in their ability to
produce morphologically complex words. Phonological awareness and mor
phological awareness contributed significantly to variance in word rea
ding, although the contribution of phonological awareness was the larg
er of the two. Further studies are needed to investigate the impact of
the delayed acquisition of phonological awareness on the development
of morphological awareness and the relationship of morphological aware
ness to reading achievement over the school years.