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Across all the domains of child development, we need to understand the temporal relationship between variables suspected to underpin growth; reading research is no exception. We conducted a preliminary evaluation of the direction of the relationship between children's morphological awareness, or the awareness of and ability to manipulate the smallest meaningful units in words, and their reading accuracy. Participants were 100 Grade 2 children who were tested again in Grade 3. We evaluated the children's morphological awareness and reading accuracy, each with 2 measures, in both Grades 2 and 3. We evaluated the outcomes in a robust measurement model including controls for phonological awareness, vocabulary, and nonverbal ability. These analyses included autoregressor controls designed to provide insight into the temporal relationship between these 2 skills. We found that children's early morphological awareness was associated with their growth in reading accuracy to the same extent that their early reading accuracy was associated with their growth in morphological awareness. Our results suggest a bidirectional relationship between children's morphological awareness and their reading accuracy, a finding that informs current models of reading development.
Deacon et al. (Mon,) studied this question.