Studies carried out in English orthography show that the ability to reflect upon the word's morphemes is related to the success in recognizing words, reading comprehension and spelling. Portuguese is a language with a more transparent letter-sound correspondence rule than English. This study investigated whether derivational morphology processing contributes to reading and spelling in Portuguese and whether this contribution is independent of phonological awareness. The results show that the ability to reflect upon the morpheme of the words contributes both to reading and spelling and this contribution is, to a certain extent, independent of phonological processing.
Metalinguistic awareness; morphological awareness; literacy
