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

Purpose: The relationship between phonological skills and literacy development is well established. However, the impact of morphological skills on reading acquisition is relatively understudied. The purpose of this study was to investigate the longitudinal relation between morphology and reading skills (accuracy and fluency) in the relatively transparent Greek orthography.
Method: Children in Grades 3 (N=173), 4 (165), and 5 (154) were assessed in word reading accuracy and fluency, text fluency, and morphosyntax (sentence completion and sequencing emphasizing inflectional and derivational endings) at two testing times six months apart (November—time 1—and April—time 2). Spelling errors on inflectional endings were available from a spelling measure of a 60-word list administered in the previous year.
Results: Hierarchical multiple regression analyses, controlling for time-1 reading skill, revealed systematic unique contributions of time-1 morphosyntactic skill to time-2 word reading accuracy (2–5% of variance). These contributions survived control for spelling performance on inflectional endings, a measure of earlier grammatical and orthographic knowledge. Contribution to time-2 text fluency was found only in fourth grade. There were no significant contributions to time-2 word reading fluency.
Conclusions: The current results point to a crucial relationship between morphological skills and reading performance, highlighting the importance of assessing and supporting the development of both morphological awareness and word-level reading throughout elementary grades. The possibility of a special (possibly transient) relationship of morphosyntax to fluency of connected text has important implications for reading intervention in highly inflected languages, such as Greek, and warrants further investigation.