The role of morphological awareness for literacy development is non‐controversial, but it is likely to depend on the characteristics of a specific orthography. Previous studies analysing the role of morphological awareness are mainly based on English samples; thus, it is unclear how generalisable these results are. In the current study, we evaluated the predictive pattern of morphological awareness on reading and spelling in German, which is characterised by high consistency between morphology and orthography. While many words cannot be spelled correctly by relying on phoneme–grapheme mappings, morphological awareness can be reliably used to infer the correct spelling for many words. In contrast, morphological awareness seems less important for reading in German given the high consistency of grapheme–phoneme mappings. Therefore, we hypothesised that the predictive pattern of morphological awareness for spelling is higher than for reading due to the structure of German orthography. In addition, we examined whether the association between morphological awareness and spelling reflects specific awareness about morphemic units or rather general knowledge about frequent and permissible letter sequences in words.

中文翻译：

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德语阅读和拼写技能的预测指标：形态意识的作用

形态意识在扫盲发展中的作用是无争议的，但它可能取决于特定拼字法的特征。先前分析形态意识的作用的研究主要基于英语样本。因此，目前尚不清楚这些结果的一般性。在当前的研究中，我们评估了德语中阅读和拼写的形态意识预测模式，该模式的特征是形态学与拼字法之间的高度一致性。尽管依靠音素-字素映射无法正确拼写许多单词，但是形态学意识可以可靠地用于推断许多单词的正确拼写。相反，鉴于字素-音素映射的高度一致性，形态学意识对于德语阅读似乎不太重要。因此，我们假设由于德国拼字法的结构，对拼写的形态意识的预测模式比对阅读的预测模式高。此外，我们检查了形态意识和拼写之间的关联是否反映了对词素单位的特定意识，还是对单词中频繁出现的字母序列的常识。