| dc.description.abstract | Despite a substantial consensus in the literature of the important role of pre-school working memory in supporting language abilities during pre-school and early school years, knowledge of the associations between working memory and morphological awareness at this age seems absent. Morphological awareness is a metalinguistic ability that enables the efficient analysis and decomposition of morphologically complex words, and has been widely recognised for being essential to children’s vocabulary building and literacy achievements during early school years. The rationale of the present study is to contribute knowledge of the cognitive mechanisms that allow for morphological awareness to facilitate these achievements. Based on this rationale, the research question informing the present study is: "Does working memory predict the development of morphological awareness over time?". This is a longitudinal study that investigates the prediction of pre-school working memory upon morphological awareness amongst Norwegian speaking children, and is written in association with the research project NumLit from the Institute of Special Needs Education at the University of Oslo. Data were obtained from 216 of the participant children in the NumLit-project. The children were all born in 2012, and have been tested in their final year of Pre-school, Grade 1, and Grade 2. Data from tasks measuring working memory, nonverbal-IQ, and receptive vocabulary were obtained from pre-school, while data from tasks measuring morphological awareness (meta-inflectional and meta-derivational awareness) were obtained all years. The data were analysed by bivariate correlations. Additionally, two hierarchical multiple regression analyses were employed with morphological awareness in Grade 1 and Grade 2 as respective outcome measures, and a statistical control of the autoregressor, receptive vocabulary, and nonverbal-IQ. The bivariate correlations revealed that working memory significantly correlated with morphological awareness in Grade 1 and Grade 2. In hierarchical regression analyses, the working memory measures failed to account for any variance in morphological awareness from Grade 1 (ΔR2 = .007, p = .348). In morphological awareness from Grade 2, a unique significant contribution of approximately 4% (ΔR2 = .039, p = .004) was attributable to working memory, above and beyond the effects of prior morphological awareness, receptive vocabulary, and nonverbal-IQ. The results show that although working memory in pre-school fails to predict morphological awareness in the first grade, working memory is a unique contributor to individual achievements in morphological awareness in the second grade. It is argued that such a result is indicative of a strengthening involvement of working memory as children develop higher meta-levels of morphological awareness. It is moreover postulated that the shift in working memory’s prediction upon morphological awareness partly derives from the fact that the constructs converge in the second grade as a result of their shared contribution to reading comprehension. The results emphasise the importance of providing efficient pathways to language and reading comprehension via morphological analysis to those children with a limited working memory span, making the finding of this study highly relevant for speech and language therapists, and special needs educators in general. Further research is necessary in order to investigate whether the results obtained in the present study are consistent, and if the longitudinal prediction of working memory upon morphological awareness proves differently across higher grade-levels, and/or across languages. | eng |