Relationship between implicit learning and early English reading skills is mediated by morphological awareness

This study examines the role of implicit learning – the ability to detect regularities in the environment without conscious effort – in English reading during the early stages of reading development. Previous investigations into the relationship between implicit learning and reading have yielded mixed findings, and some have raised the notion that previous implicit learning tasks are unidimensional, and/or that the relationship between implicit learning and reading may be mediated by an intermediary variable, such as a metalinguistic skill. To evaluate the predictions of these theories, an implicit learning task comprising four subtests (old-new, cooccurrence, position, generalisation) was administered to 82 first-grade children along with a battery of language and cognitive measures. Significant correlations were observed among the accuracies in the generalisation subtest in the implicit learning task, English word reading, and English morpheme discrimination. Mediation analysis revealed that the relationship between generalisation and English word reading was fully mediated by morpheme discrimination. These findings underscore the multifaceted nature of implicit learning, and provide insights into the potential mechanism through which implicit learning contributes to reading development.