The Relation Between Morphological Awareness and Reading Comprehension in French Upper Elementary Grades: Evidence from Word Reading Mediation and Grade Moderation Models

This study investigated how morphological awareness contributes directly or indirectly through word reading to sentence reading comprehension in French-speaking children third-and-fifth graders and how grade moderates these relations. Participants completed a morphological word analogy task, a standardized word reading fluency test, and a silent sentence reading comprehension test. Vocabulary knowledge, non-verbal reasoning, and phonological awareness were included as control variables. Using path analysis within a structural equation modeling framework, we tested moderated mediation models assessing both direct and indirect effects of morphological awareness on sentence reading comprehension through word reading fluency, as well as moderation by grade level. Results showed a weak but significant direct effect of morphological awareness on sentence reading comprehension, whereas the indirect effect through word reading fluency was not significant. Grade level did not moderate either pathway. Findings indicate that, in a moderately opaque orthography such as French, morphological awareness directly supports word reading fluency but also reading comprehension directly and beyond this former, suggesting the need for explicit morphological instruction in upper-elementary education.