Purpose: This study was conducted to: 1)determine the factor structure of different morphological awareness tasks of college students with no known language, hearing, vision or academic difficulties, and 2)create and examine the direct and indirect effects of a reliable and validated morphological awareness factor structure on spelling, word-level reading, and sentence comprehension abilities in this population. Method:Three morphological awareness tasks, spelling to dictation, word reading, and sentence comprehension tasks, were administered to 214 undergraduate college students. Factor analyses were conducted to determine the factor structure of the morphological awareness tasks. A validated exogenous morphological awareness measure was generated and path analysis was run to examine direct and indirect effects of morphological awareness on college students' literacy abilities. Results: Exploratory factor analyses revealed that the morphological awareness factor structure was unidimensional. Analyses using Item Response Theory generated a 24-item, validated, exogenous measure. Path analysis revealed that the standardized path coefficients in the direct model were .77 for spelling, .62 for word reading, and .58 for sentence comprehension. Path analysis for the indirect model indicated that the standardized indirect effect of morphological awareness on sentence comprehension was. 38 through spelling and .13 through word reading. Conclusion: College students' morphological awareness can be assessed using a validated measure that reflects a uni dimensional factor structure. Morphological awareness is a stronger predictor for spelling than for word reading and sentence comprehension. Both spelling and word reading mediated the effects of morphological awareness on sentence comprehension. However, spelling was a stronger mediator than word reading; this may have been due to differences in the task demands of spelling and word reading. / A Dissertation submitted to the College of Communication and Information in partial
fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2011. / Date of Defense: January 21, 2011. / Lexical Quality Hypothesis, No-Shift, One-Shift, Two-Shift, Average Family Frequency, Transparency, Discrimination Parameter, Linguistic Process, Test Information Function / Includes bibliographical references. / Kenn Apel, Professor Directing Dissertation; Barbara Foorman, University Representative; Stephanie Dent Al Otaiba, Committee Member; Shurita Thomas-Tate, Committee Member.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_169074 |
| Contributors | Wilson-Fowler, Elizabeth B. (authoraut), Apel, Kenn (professor directing dissertation), Foorman, Barbara (university representative), Al Otaiba, Stephanie Dent (committee member), Thomas-Tate, Shurita (committee member), School of Communication (degree granting department), Florida State University (degree granting institution) |
| Publisher | Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Language | English, English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, text |
| Format | 1 online resource, computer, application/pdf |
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