Presented at the 19th Annual Conference of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading; Montreal, Canada, July 11–14 2012.

Purpose: The role of phonological awareness for spelling development has been established for English but remains controversial in more transparent orthographies. On the other hand, morphological awareness has been proposed as a prerequisite for the development of morphological spelling. Greek is particularly suited for this investigation due to relatively transparent orthography and morphological richness. We examined morphosyntactic skills and phonological awareness as predictors of future spelling ability among Greek-speaking children in late elementary grades.
Method: 476 Greek-speaking children attending grades 4, 5, and 6 were assessed on morphosyntax (sentence completion targeting mainly inflectional and derivational morphology and clitics), phonemic awareness (phoneme deletion using multisyllabic nonwords) and spelling (a 60-word list) at two testing occasions approximately 6 months apart.
Results: Both phoneme deletion (coefficients about .54) and morphosyntax (.49) were significantly correlated with current and future spelling ability. Hierarchical linear regressions indicated that phoneme deletion (ΔR² = .133) and morphosyntax (ΔR² = .073) at time 1 were significant unique predictors of spelling at time 2, controlling for each other. However, after controlling for the autoregressive effect of spelling, phoneme deletion (ΔR² = .003, p = .003) remained the single unique longitudinal predictor of spelling.
Conclusions: These findings indicate that phonological awareness, when properly assessed with a sufficiently demanding task, remains significantly correlated with, and predictive of, spelling development past the early elementary grades, even in a relatively transparent orthography in which there is little ambiguity over phonemic spellings and most spelling difficulties relate to morphological endings and word stem etymology.