Browsing by Author "Parisianos, Veera"

Aims. Inflectional morphology is an essential part of Finnish grammar acquisition. Yet the role of inflectional skills as a preparatory precursor of reading acquisition has earned only a little attention. The purpose of this study was to investigate the predictive relations between inflectional morphology at the age of 3;6 and later pre-reading skills at the age of 5;0. In addition, it was of interest to learn about the predictive relations between noun inflections and pre-reading skills and verb inflections and pre-reading skills. Methods. The participants of this study were 40 children from the norming study of the Finnish short form version of the Communicative Development Inventories. The children were assessed at the age of 3;6 and 5;0. Mastery of Finnish inflectional morphology was measured at the age of 3;6 with the Inflectional Morphology Test (Lyytinen, 1988a). At the age of 5;0 children´s pre-reading skills were assessed with a method to evaluate early reading related skills and risk of reading disability (LUKIVA) and mapping of linguistic awareness. Test scores were analyzed quantitively. Results. According to the findings of this study it seems that inflectional morphology at 3;6 years of age predicts pre-reading skills at 5;0. Inflectional morphology correlated with letter knowledge, Lukiva-index, alliteration and mapping of linguistic awareness. According to the regression analysis inflectional morphology and especially noun inflectional morphology predicted 30–40 % of pre-reading skills, while verb inflection did not predict pre-reading skills. The results indicate that inflectional morphology may have and important effect on the pre-reading skills of Finnishspeaking children.