Like English, German has a high morphological consistency, which means that the spelling of morphemes remains constant in different word forms (Landerl, 2017). Different facets of morphological awareness (like inflectional, derivational and compound morphology) might play a distinct role when a high number of variants have to be mastered. For example, German has a rich morphology, especially with regard to inflections and compounds (Elsen, 2014 König & Gast, 2012). Due to differences in the characteristics of languages, evidence for relations between morphological awareness and literacy from studies conducted in a particular language cannot, however, be directly transferred to other languages. Morphological awareness has been identified as a meaningful cognitive variable for explaining literacy skills for different languages, for example English (Lee, 2011 Ruan et al., 2018), French (Fejzo, 2016), Greek (Pittas & Nunes, 2014), Italian (Vernice & Pagliarini, 2018), Hebrew (Vaknin-Nusbaum et al., 2016), and Chinese (Ruan et al., 2018).
Morphological awareness can help choosing the correct spelling based on the meaning structure of the linguistic entity (McCutchen & Stull, 2015 Nunes et al., 1997). With regard to spelling, in many orthographies there is more than one way to spell phonemes or sequences of phonemes (Nunes et al., 1997). Morphological awareness can also aid pronunciation when the reader knows some of the morphemes of a word or recognizes the word as a whole based on its morphemes. The ability to recognize morphemes, which refer to the smallest units of meaning in a language (Elsen, 2014), aids children in understanding written language, for example by deducing the meaning of unknown words. Morphological awareness gives access to the meaning structure of a language (McBride-Chang, 2004). It is a subset of morphological processing and involves the conscious awareness of morphemes (Deacon et al., 2008). Morphological awareness is a linguistic awareness skill (Apel, 2014) that is defined as the ability to recognize, reflect on and change morphological structures in a language (Carlisle, 1995). Yet, we still know little about how important the handling of such morphological units is in different languages when children learn to read and write. read + er) are the building blocks of meaning in both oral and written language. Yet, morphological fluency might start to unfold its relevance for reading and spelling near the end of fourth grade in German. This might indicate that in the transparent German orthography, alphabetic reading and spelling strategies are particularly relevant until the end of Grade 4. Phonological processing shows stronger relations with literacy than morphological awareness does. Despite the asymmetry of German orthography, no evidence was found for differences in the association of morphological awareness with spelling versus reading. The results reveal that different facets of morphological awareness are related to literacy skills in German primary school children. Morphological awareness did not explain additional variance. In regression analyses, variance in literacy skills was predominantly explained by phonological awareness. More literacy variables were related to morphological fluency in Grade 4 than in Grades 2 and 3. These were correlated with both reading and spelling skills in all grades. Factor analyses revealed two facets of morphological awareness: morphological fluency and morphological awareness for pseudowords. Additionally, phonological processing, vocabulary, reading fluency, reading comprehension and spelling were measured. Morphological awareness tasks required the production of inflections, derivations and compounds. This cross-sectional study was conducted with German-speaking second-, third- and fourth-graders ( n of final sample ≥ 85 per grade). Little is known about the role of grade level for these relationships and of their relative strength compared to those between other language-related variables and literacy skills. Studies investigating relations between morphological awareness and literacy in German, a language with a rather transparent but asymmetric orthography, are sparse.