Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

9-2026

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Program

Educational Psychology

Advisor

Linnea Ehri

Advisor

Alpana Bhattacharya

Committee Members

Bruce Homer

Susan Gray

Esther Friedman

Subject Categories

Curriculum and Instruction | Educational Methods | Educational Psychology | Elementary Education | Teacher Education and Professional Development

Keywords

multisyllable word learning, syllable segmentation, analysis of morphemes, developing readers, third grade, orthographic mapping

Abstract

In the early years of elementary school when children are still learning to read, they are presented with words of increased syllable length, and orthographic and morphological complexity in the texts they read.  Although multisyllabic words comprise 90% of words in the English lexicon and carry important linguistic information for expanding vocabularies and comprehension of content, few studies have focused on teaching middle elementary children to read multisyllabic words.  Many children lack strategies to identify these longer more complex words accurately and easily, leading to reading difficulties that place weaker readers at higher risk for school related problems and limit future academic achievement.  Due to the importance of proficient word recognition of longer, complex words by the end of third grade, this study compared two methods for improving multisyllabic word reading: 1) segmentation of syllables and identification of morphemes, and 2) repeated reading of whole words.  Sixty general education third graders, who did not exceed a third-grade-equivalent reading level, were randomly assigned to one of three conditions; Syllable Segmentation and Morpheme Identification, Whole Word Reading and Alphabetizing, or a No-Treatment Control condition.  Students in the two treatment groups learned to read 80 multisyllabic words and their meanings over several learning trials. Two reading ability levels were distinguished to analyze the effects of the two conditions on better and poorer readers separately.  Results compared both reading methods to business-as-usual classroom instruction.  Based on developmental stage models of reading acquisition and phase theory of word recognition, superior effects of training in syllable and morpheme segmentation were expected across several literacy measures: multisyllabic word and non-word reading, spelling, and passage reading accuracy and comprehension.

Results showed that both segmentation and whole word reading were effective at teaching third graders to read multisyllable words.  This affirms the value of repeated practice reading words with corrective feedback to teach individual students to map pronunciations to different sized spelling units, including syllables, morphemes and whole words, to secure words in memory.  On posttests the better readers in both conditions read the training words equally well and better than controls.  However, the better readers in the syllable group outperformed better readers in the whole word group in remembering the spellings of trained words, in identifying affixes in trained words, in circling syllables in untrained words, and in reading multisyllabic non-words.  The poorer readers in both groups made gains during training in learning to read multisyllabic words.  However, the gains were greater in the whole word condition.  On posttests, poorer reader in the two training conditions read training words equally well and much better than controls.  However, the segmentation group identified more affixes than the whole word group.  Poorer readers struggled to spell any words correctly but pretest to posttest gains recalling letters in the spellings revealed a difference favoring the two treatments over the control.  Also, the segmentation group outperformed the control group in identifying base words and in reading multisyllabic non-words that contained morpheme subunits they had read in training words.  Superior performance by both better and poorer readers who were taught to segment training words into morphemes indicates that they had consolidated these units during training and were using them to decode non-words.  Although poorer readers showed some benefit from training, this instruction produced stronger effects in better readers, suggesting that this training may be more appropriate for readers who have acquired more substantial decoding skills, evidenced by performance at or above a 2.5 grade-equivalent word reading level. Results are interpreted to support orthographic mapping as a process that moves students into the consolidated phase in learning to read words.

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