Description:

Purpose: In this project, the researchers' goal was to further understand the mechanisms used by students to increase their vocabulary and comprehension through the use of morphological insights and develop instructional practices to support their learning. At the time of this study, although many vocabulary researchers had theorized that morphological awareness was involved in the observed explosion of students' reading vocabulary over the elementary years, competing explanations existed. Even among researchers who argued for the importance of morphological awareness in vocabulary and comprehension, the specific mechanisms underlying morphology's role in comprehension had not been specified.

Project Activities: The project team proposed to examine processes supporting reading comprehension in students in the upper elementary and middle school grades, with primary attention to morphological awareness and its contribution to comprehension, vocabulary, and spelling. The researchers had three specific aims:

1. identify, through controlled experiments, possible mechanisms by which students in grades 5 and 8 use the morphological structure of words during reading to decode unfamiliar words and access their meanings
2. examine the extent to which the use of semantic decomposition and ortho-phonemic mapping is related to skill level, or whether these are alternative strategies determined by factors other than skill
3. conduct an instructional experiment on alternative approaches to increasing morphological awareness and comprehension, in order to test competing theoretical mechanisms

The competing theoretical mechanisms were semantic decomposition (analyzing the semantic information in novel words and inducing word meaning by combining subword meanings) and ortho-phonemic mapping (recognizing phonemic patterns within novel words, combining the patterns into a pronounceable longer string, and scanning the lexicon for a related meaning). The researchers also aimed to  examine the feasibility of specific instruction in each of these two approaches.

Structured Abstract

THE FOLLOWING CONTENT DESCRIBES THE PROJECT AT THE TIME OF FUNDING

Setting: The schools are located in the state of Washington.

Sample: Students in grades 5 and 8 from private and public elementary and middle schools will participate, including both skilled and less-skilled readers.

Intervention: The researchers will compare two intervention conditions with a treated control condition. The intervention conditions are designed to explore the specific nature of the lexical components students use as they attempt to comprehend complex, multi-morphemic words in connected text. One intervention, the semantic decomposition condition, is designed to help students develop skills to strategically segment and semantically analyze the morphological units within words ("Remember, what does -less on the end of word usually mean? Do you see a familiar root word inside this word? What could this longer word mean?"). The second condition, the ortho-phonemic condition, provides instruction and activities to help students fluently decode recognizable orthographic units within words without stressing semantic analysis ("Does anyone see a familiar pattern of letters in this word? How do we usually pronounce them? How would we pronounce this longer word?").

Research Design and Methods: Studies 1 and 2 employ experimental designs in which fifth and eighth grade students make lexical decisions to words with various morphological characteristics. Study 3 is also an experimental design, requiring fifth and eighth grade students to infer the meanings of single-morpheme or multi-morpheme words within a discourse context. Studies 1 through 3 will employ a repeated-measures design in which each student will serve as his or her own control across conditions. Study 4 is an experimental design with fifth graders that involves a comparison of two intervention conditions with a treated control condition. For Study 4, students within each participating classroom will be randomly assigned to one of the three conditions.

Control Condition: In study 4, students in the control condition will read and discuss grade-appropriate texts.

Key Measures: Students will complete a battery of standardized tests to generate a profile of reading skill for each participant. The Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-3 will be administered as a measure of receptive vocabulary. Reading comprehension will be assessed through standard group administration of the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test 3rd Edition. Spelling skills will be assessed using a group-administered adaptation of the spelling test developed by Nagy et al. , which contains multi-morpheme words. In addition, students will complete the Word Attack and Word Identification subtests from the Woodcock Reading Mastery Test-Revised ( and the Phoneme Elision subtest from the Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing . In each study, students will also complete study-specific measures of reading comprehension.

Data Analytic Strategy: For studies 1 and 2, reaction times and accuracies will be analyzed using repeated measures ANOVAs. For study 3, comprehension measures and definition accuracies will be submitted to repeated measures ANOVAs. In Study 4, ANCOVAs and growth modeling will be used to examine differences among the three treatment groups.

Products and Publications

ERIC Citations: Find available citations in ERIC for this award here.

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Book chapters

McCutchen, D. (2012). Phonological, Orthographic, and Morphological Word-Level Skills Supporting Multiple Levels of the Writing Process. In V. Berninger (Ed.), Past, Present, and Future Contributions of Cognitive Writing Research to Cognitive Psychology (pp. 197–216). New York: Psychology Press.

Journal articles

McCutchen, D., and Logan, B. (2011). Inside Incidental Word Learning: Children's Strategic Use of Morphological Information to Infer Word Meanings. Reading Research Quarterly, 46(4): 334–349.

McCutchen, D., and Stull, S. (2015). Morphological Awareness and Children's Writing: Accuracy, Error, and Invention. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 28(2): 271–289.

McCutchen, D., Green, L., Abbott, R.D., and Sanders, E. (2009). Further Evidence for Teacher Knowledge: Supporting Struggling Readers in Grades Three Through Five. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 22(4): 401–423.

McCutchen, D., Green, L., and Abbott, R.D. (2008). Children's Morphological Knowledge: Links to Literacy. Reading Psychology, 29(4): 289–314.

McCutchen, D., Logan, B., and Biangardi-Orpe, U. (2009). Making Meaning: Children's Sensitivity to Morphological Information During Word Reading. Reading Research Quarterly, 44(1): 360–376.

McCutchen, D., Stull, S., Herrera, B.L., Lotas, S., and Evans, S. (2014). Putting Words to Work Effects of Morphological Instruction on Children's Writing. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 47(1): 86–97.