Morphological awareness and reading skill for deaf and hearing adults.
Emily Saunders, Haley Helms, Karen Emmorey
PMID 40580549WHAT IT FOUND
For deaf adults reading English, morphological awareness strongly predicts reading comprehension, but only for those who already have high morphological skills.
Hearing readers rely more on phonological awareness. This suggests deaf readers use visual word parts to infer meaning, not sound.
Key findings
01Morphological awareness correlated significantly with reading comprehension for deaf readers (r = 0.43), but not for hearing readers (r = 0.29).
02In separate group regressions, vocabulary size was a significant predictor of reading comprehension for deaf readers, while spelling was a significant predictor for both groups.
03For the subset with phonological awareness data, phonological awareness predicted reading comprehension for hearing readers but not for deaf readers.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The study was cross-sectional and correlational; it cannot prove that improving morphological awareness causes better reading. The comparison groups differed in language history: deaf participants were ASL-English bilinguals reading in a second language, while hearing participants were monolinguals reading in their native language. Many findings, particularly the interaction between morphology and reading, were post-hoc exploratory analyses. The phonological awareness test had a restricted range of scores for hearing participants, potentially masking its true contribution. The sample size for the phonological awareness subgroup was small (42 participants).
Declared interests
The study was funded by the National Science Foundation. No other conflicts of interest are reported.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume that teaching morphological awareness will automatically improve reading for all deaf adults. The study found that morphology only predicted reading comprehension for deaf readers who already had high morphological skills. For those with low skills, the link was not significant.
Summarised by AI from the full paper, without a clinician reviewing it. Check it against the source before it changes what you do. Read it on PubMed →