Imageability and transparency in morphological awareness: A study of how third-grade children made lemonade from lemon

Morphological awareness has been established as important to literacy success, and as such, it is critical to study factors affecting children's performance on measures of this skill. Morphological transparency, or the clarity of the sound and letter pattern relationship between base words and their associated morphological forms, has been found to affect morphological awareness performance. An additional factor of imageability, or how clearly a word can be visualized, also could affect such performance. Thus, the purpose of this study was to examine the effect of imageability, as it relates to transparency, on children's morphological awareness responses. Seventy-two third-grade children completed a morphological awareness production task that included words controlled for transparency and imageability. Results of this mixed design revealed that imageability appeared to interact with transparency and words of high imageability were more readily produced than those of low imageability in conditions of low and high transparency. These results suggest that imageability should be considered when developing morphological awareness tasks aimed at measuring developmental expectations for school-age children.