Contributions of morphological awareness skills to word-level reading and spelling in first-grade children with and without speech sound disorder.

Purpose: In this study, the authors compared the morphological awareness abilities of children with speech sound disorder (SSD) and children with typical speech skills and examined how morphological awareness ability predicted word-level reading and spelling performance above other known contributors to literacy development.

Method: Eighty-eight first-grade students--44 students with SSD and no known history of language deficiencies, and 44 students with typical speech and language skills--completed an assessment battery designed to measure speech sound production, morphological awareness, phonemic awareness, letter-name knowledge, receptive vocabulary, word-level reading, and spelling abilities.

Results: The children with SSD scored significantly lower than did their counterparts on the morphological awareness measures as well as on phonemic awareness, word-level reading, and spelling tasks.