The contribution of morphological awareness to reading comprehension in Hebrew was tested in 100 second- and third-grade students on three types of morphology: inflections, derivations, and construct formation, controlling for vocabulary knowledge. Third graders performed better than second graders on inflectional and construct formation awareness, but only derivations and construct formation predicted success in reading comprehension. Significant differences in reading comprehension but not in orthographic word recognition and phonological decoding were found between students with low and high morphological awareness. The results highlight the importance of examining the unique contribution of different components of morphological awareness to reading comprehension.

This study measures whether number and type of morphemes in an elicited imitation string result in a greater number of modifications with L2 experience. Rationale is drawn from L2 working memory processing limitations at distinct levels of proficiency. 38 subjects (L2 Spanish university students) comprise three proficiency groups: beginning, undergraduate majors and graduate students. Number of morphemes was varied within each syllable count; and responses were either correct or modified (lexemically/inflectionally as deletions or substitutions). One or two way ANOVAs determined significance between mean proportions for each group. Findings indicate that increases in number of morphemes yielded significant differences, and that while the lowest proficiency group produced higher proportions of lexical deletions, the modifications made by more advanced groups were inflectional substitutions.