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Background: The role of morphological awareness for literacy development is non-controversial, but it is likely to depend on the characteristics of a specific orthography. Previous studies analysing the role of morphological awareness are mainly based on English samples; thus, it is unclear how generalisable these results are. In the current study, we evaluated the predictive pattern of morphological awareness on reading and spelling in German, which is characterised by high consistency between morphology and orthography. While many words cannot be spelled correctly by relying on phoneme-grapheme mappings, morphological awareness can be reliably used to infer the correct spelling for many words. In contrast, morphological awareness seems less important for reading in German given the high consistency of grapheme-phoneme mappings. Therefore, we hypothesised that the predictive pattern of morphological awareness for spelling is higher than for reading due to the structure of German orthography. In addition, we examined whether the association between morphological awareness and spelling reflects specific awareness about morphemic units or rather general knowledge about frequent and permissible letter sequences in words. Method: We developed web-based tasks that allowed us to assess morphological awareness using pseudowords. Based on the data of 3,122 third and fourth graders, we analysed the predictive pattern of morphological awareness on reading and spelling after controlling for non-verbal cognitive abilities, age/grade, phoneme awareness and sublexical orthographic sensitivity. Results: We found that morphological awareness accounted for significant amounts of unique variance over and above sublexical orthographic sensitivity in both literacy measures but was a better predictor for spelling than for reading. Conclusions: The role of morphological awareness depends on the structure of a given orthography. In German, this is reflected by differences in the predictive pattern between reading and spelling skills. Furthermore, results support the specific role of morphological awareness for spelling in the German orthography.

Purpose: The present study examined cross-linguistic differences in orthographic transparency and morphological complexity during complex word recognition in English and Italian. If morphological processing is more important in orthographically transparent and morphemically rich languages, larger morpheme-effects should be evident in Italian. However, if morphological processing is more pronounced in orthographically opaque and morphemically sparser languages, morpheme-effects should be larger in English. Method: 60 Italian (Mage = 25.33, 34 females, Caucasian) and 60 English (Mage = 26.35, 34 females, mostly Caucasian) native-speakers completed an online lexical decision task, while reaction times and accuracy were measured. To tease apart the independent role of stems and suffixes, we employed four types of nonwords: Stem+Suffix: night+ness, Stem+NonSuffix: night-lude, NonStem+Suffix: nisht+ness, NonStem+NonSuffix: nisht-lude). Results: The results revealed a significant morpheme interference effect in both languages: nonwords with stems were read slower and less accurately than those without stems and nonwords with suffixes slower and less accurately than those without suffixes. Crucially, this observed pattern was larger in English than Italian. Also, a significant Stem by Suffix interaction suggested that Stem+Suffix nonwords were harder to reject than all others. Conclusion: The current findings suggest that morphological processing is more pronounced in opaque orthographies like English, possibly because the activation of morphemic chunks can be used to compensate for grapheme-to-phoneme inconsistencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]