Prospective Associations Between Morphological Awareness and Children’s (Written) Language Skills: A Systematic Meta-Analytic Review of Longitudinal Studies

Although morphological awareness (MA) is increasingly recognised as relevant to language and literacy development, questions remain about its prospective relations. Previous meta-analyses showed moderate to strong cross-sectional associations between MA and language and literacy skills, whereas the effects of morphological instruction in school-aged children are inconsistent, particularly for reading comprehension. Synthesised longitudinal evidence is therefore needed to provide insight into whether the associations remain across a temporal separation. To address this research gap, this systematic meta-analytic review investigated the longitudinal associations between MA and later vocabulary, word reading, reading comprehension, and spelling, as well as potential moderators of these associations. To inform educational considerations, the review focused on school-aged children learning alphabetic writing systems. Thirty-five longitudinal studies comprising 224 correlations were included in the separate random-effects models. MA showed significant, moderate-to-strong correlations with later word reading ( r = .48), reading comprehension ( r = .55), vocabulary ( r = .46) and spelling ( r = .41). Meta-regression analyses revealed stronger correlations with reading accuracy ( r = .51) than with reading fluency ( r = .39). Tentative findings suggested that associations between MA and word reading and spelling may increase with age and be stronger for word reading in deep orthographies. A qualitative synthesis showed that MA was operationalised using diverse task formats, which may have contributed to variation in the observed associations. Extending cross-sectional findings, the results highlight the prospective associations between MA and later language and literacy skills and the need for clearer operationalisation, standardised assessment instruments, and further evaluation of morphological instruction.