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The Contribution Of Morphological Knowledge To 7th Grade Students’ Reading Comprehension Performance, Kouider Mokhtari, Joanna Neel, Abbey Matatall, Andrea Richards

Kouider Mokhtari

In this study, we examined the role of morphology, an important yet largely understudied source of difficulty, in reading ability among 7th grade students in one junior high school in the southwestern United States. We sought to find out how much variance in reading ability is accounted for by these students’ morphological knowledge, and whether skilled readers do in fact have higher levels of morphological knowledge than less skilled student peers. We found that students’ sensitivity to the morphological structure of words accounted for 18% of the variance in these students’ reading performance. We further found that skilled readers had …