Use of Grammatical Morphemes by Beginning Readers

Abstract

Grammatical morphemes have little inherent meaning but provide the syntactic cues necessary to structure language (the, -ing). Twenty-four good beginning readers and 24 poor readers from 12 suburban schools were tested on three measures of grammatical morpheme use: sentence recall, speech production, and language comprehension. The two groups did not differ in sentence recall. Good readers produced more correct grammatical morphemes than poor readers, but the difference disappeared when IQ effects were partialized. More grammatical morphemes were comprehended by good readers than poor readers, even when IQ was controlled.