In her new book, eight-year-old Eloise comes across the word ‘supermagnetforce’. She has never heard or read it before, yet she is still able to work out what it means. This is because she recognises the individual components: ‘super’, ‘magnet’ and ‘force’, and understands how they fit together. The ability to recognise the internal structure of words and to work with their components is known as ‘morphological awareness’. Researchers at Paderborn University and Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich are investigating, as part of a collaborative project, how this ability relates to children’s (written) language skills and how it can be specifically nurtured. The research team has recently published a meta-analysis in the renowned journal “Educational Research Review” on the longitudinal relationships between morphological awareness and spoken and written language skills.
Although morphological awareness (MA) is increasingly recognised as relevant to language, reading, and writing skills, questions regarding the specific relationships remain unanswered. Previous meta-analyses have shown moderate to strong correlations between morphological awareness and various language skills. However, these studies were predominantly based on cross-sectional studies in which children’s skills were assessed at a single point in time. It therefore remained unclear whether these correlations also hold true over longer periods of time.
“To close this research gap, we have pooled the results of 35 longitudinal studies. We wanted to know to what extent children’s morphological awareness is linked to their later spoken and written language skills,” explains project coordinator Joanna Bodynek from Paderborn University. The researchers investigated the links between morphological awareness and later vocabulary, word reading, reading comprehension, and spelling. “Our findings show that children with a higher level of morphological awareness tend to demonstrate better spoken and written language skills later on,” says Bodynek. The link with later reading comprehension was particularly clear.
At the same time, the correlations varied, in some cases significantly, between the individual studies. One possible explanation for this lies in the tasks used. “The studies included measure morphological awareness in some cases in very different ways,” explains project leader Prof. Dr. Kristina Jonas from Paderborn University. “For example, children have to break words down into their constituent parts, form related words or compose new words from given building blocks. Such differences in the tasks may contribute to the studies finding correlations of varying strength.”
For the research team, the findings provide an important basis for the next steps. As the project progresses, a programme to develop morphological awareness is to be devised and evaluated. The aim is to help children recognise and use word structures in a targeted manner, thereby strengthening their reading, vocabulary, and spelling skills.
“Our meta-analysis shows that morphological awareness is closely linked to key spoken and written language skills in the long term,” summarises Bodynek. “Building on this, we now wish to investigate how morphological awareness can be specifically fostered at school age and which intervention approaches are particularly suitable for this.”
To the article (Open Access): https://doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2026.100831
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