Studies carried out in alphabetic languages show that morphological awareness - the ability to reflect upon the word's morphemes - is related to the success in recognizing words and comprehension in reading and spelling. Portuguese is a language located in the middle of transparent letter-sound correspondence rules. In transparent languages, those with regular grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules, morphological awareness may not have the impact in written language acquisition. This study investigated whether derivational morphology processing contributes to reading in Portuguese in primary education and whether this contribution is independent of phonological decoding. A phoneme spooneirism task and another of phoneme subtraction task was used to access reading decoding and the TDE was used to assess reading recognition. The results show that decoding is a very important ability to learn to read and that the ability to reflect upon the morphemes of the words contributes to reading and that this contribution is, to a certain extent independent of phonological awareness.
Metalinguistic awareness; Morphological awareness; Phonological decoding; Reading; Literacy
