Publications

Publication details [#63425]

Tibi, Sana and John R. Kirby. 2017. Morphological awareness: Construct and predictive validity in Arabic. Applied Psycholinguistics 38 (5) : 1019–1043.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Keywords
Place, Publisher
Cambridge University Press

Annotation

This inquiry aimed at exploring the dimensions underlying morphological awareness (MA) in Arabic (construct validity) and at defining how well MA predicted reading (predictive validity). Ten MA tasks differing in key dimensions (oral vs. written, single word vs. sentence contexts, and standard vs. local dialect) and two reading tasks (real word and pseudoword reading) were administered to 102 Arabic-speaking Grade 3 children in Abu-Dhabi. Factor assay of the MA tasks produced one paramount factor, supporting the construct validity of MA in Arabic. Closer inspection disclosed that this factor had two subcomponents, oral and written. Hierarchical regression analyses, controlling for age and gender, pointed out that both the one- and the two-factor solutions accounted for 48% of the variance in word reading, and 40% of the variance in pseudoword reading, supporting the predictive validity of MA. Implications for future inquiry, evaluation, and instruction are debated.