Date of Award

5-2013

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Communicative Disorders and Deaf Education

Committee Chair(s)

Julie Wolter

Committee

Julie Wolter

Committee

Lisa Milman

Committee

Wendy Holliday

Abstract

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to the determine the feasibility of studying whether a) a morphological awareness dynamic assessment task was sensitive to assessing emerging knowledge of morphological awareness and revealed a range of performance in typically developing children, and b) performance on a dynamic assessment of morphological awareness is related to other predictors of language and literacy success. Method: Participants for this study included 15 typically developing children attending preschool in the Intermountain West with a mean age of 5 years, 2 months. The Early Dynamic Assessment of Morphological Awareness (EDAMA) was developed and administered, and a static morphological generation task and a language literacy battery were administered to each child. The EDAMA required children to use their knowledge of base words and suffixes to infer meaning of unfamiliar, morphologically complex words. The 17 stimulus items were administered with a series of increasingly helpful scaffolds to help facilitate morphological awareness knowledge. Results: A measurement of the skew of the data revealed that the EDAMA is less likely to have a floor effect in 4-year-olds than a static morphological generation task, and a correlational analysis revealed that the dynamic assessment may be more significantly related to later literacy success than a static assessment. Implications: The findings of this study indicated that dynamic assessment may be used as a sensitive test to discriminate a range of performance. The EDAMA appeared to be useful as a screening measure to provide assessment and treatment insights for young children.

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