Evaluating models of how morphological awareness connects to reading comprehension: A study in Portuguese
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background Reading comprehension is a complex skill, drawing on a range of resources. One is morphological awareness, or the awareness of the smallest meaningful units in language. Testing the predictions of the Simple View of Reading, we evaluate how morphological awareness relates to reading comprehension in a relatively transparent orthography. Method There were 70 Portuguese‐speaking children in Grade 2 in our study. The children completed measures of morphological awareness and reading comprehension, along with two potential mediators: word reading and listening comprehension. Children also completed control measures of phonological awareness and nonverbal ability. Results Path analysis showed that there were indirect effects of morphological awareness on reading comprehension through each of word reading and listening comprehension. There was no significant direct effect of morphological awareness on reading comprehension beyond these mediators and controls. Conclusions Our results provide a novel empirical confirmation of the predictions of current models of reading comprehension. We do so for readers of a relatively transparent orthography. Highlights What is already known about this topic Many studies with English‐speaking children have demonstrated that morphological awareness contributes to reading comprehension. Much less is known about how this relation works and if it holds for readers of relatively transparent orthographies. What this paper adds This study shows that the relation between morphological awareness and reading comprehension holds for children learning to read in the relatively transparent orthography of Portuguese. This study also shows just how these relations work. For Portuguese‐speaking children in Grade 2, the relation between morphological awareness and reading comprehension is fully mediated by word reading and listening comprehension. Implications for theory, policy or practice Our findings provide support for the Simple View of Reading, highlighting the dual roles of word reading and listening comprehension in reading comprehension. Our findings point to targets for intervention; morphological awareness instruction might be most effective if paired with instruction on how morphology impacts both word reading and oral language.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".