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Exploring the Relations of Morphological Awareness with Phonological Awareness and Vocabulary: The Case of the Greek Language

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Abstract

Although relations between morphological awareness, phonological awareness, and vocabulary have been widely observed, questions remain about their precise associations. The purpose of the present study was to explore the relations of morphological awareness with two highly related linguistic skills (phonological awareness and vocabulary) in a transparent orthography with rich morphology. The study sample consisted of 121 (58 males, Mean age = 93.94 months, SD = 3.32) 2nd grade Greek-speaking children. Confirmatory factor analysis revealed that the three-factor model provided the best fit to the data, indicating that although morphological awareness, phonological awareness, and vocabulary are highly correlated, they represent distinct linguistic constructs. In addition, hierarchical regression analysis was used to examine the bidirectional effects between the three linguistic skills. Results revealed that both phonological awareness and vocabulary significantly contributed to morphological awareness, with phonological awareness having a stronger effect. Conversely, morphological awareness significantly affected both phonological awareness and vocabulary. The effect size from phonological awareness and vocabulary to morphological awareness was similar to the effect size reported from morphological awareness to phonological awareness and vocabulary. These results suggest that morphological awareness is highly associated with phonological awareness and vocabulary, being though a distinct skill. In addition, it seems that these linguistic skills have bidirectional effects with each other in first grades.

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Data Availability

The data presented in this study are available on request from the corresponding author.

Notes

  1. According to Cohen’s (1988) classification, correlation is considered weak (.30), moderate (.50), and large (.70).

  2. We calculated composite score by averaging the z-scores of the respective component measures.

  3. According to Cohen’s (1988) classification, the effect size is considered small (.20), moderate (.50), and large (> .80).

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Funding

For this research the first author got a grant which was co-financed by Greece and the European Union (European Social Fund- ESF) through the Operational Programme «Human Resources Development, Education and Lifelong Learning» in the context of the project “Scholarships programme for post- graduate studies” (MIS-5000432), implemented by the State Scholarships Foundation.

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Contributions

Conceptualization, S.G. and I.G; methodology and formal analysis, S.G.; data curation, S.G. and S.P.; writing—original draft preparation, S.G. and I.G.; writing—review and editing, S.P. and A.M.; supervision, S.P. and A.M.; funding acquisition, S.G. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Sophia Giazitzidou.

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Informed consent was obtained from all subjects involved in the study.

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Giazitzidou, S., Grigorakis, I., Mouzaki, A. et al. Exploring the Relations of Morphological Awareness with Phonological Awareness and Vocabulary: The Case of the Greek Language. J Psycholinguist Res 52, 2621–2644 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-023-10006-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-023-10006-z

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