The International Dyslexia Association recently revised their definition of dyslexia, which impacts 1 in 5 Americans to include morphological awareness.
August 26, 2026 | Erin Bluvas, bluvase@sc.edu
Kenn Apel may have retired from his 35-year career in academia in 2020, but the Distinguished Professor Emeritus and former department chair did not let that – or a pandemic – stop him from bringing one of his most impactful projects to fruition. Thanks to the efforts of Apel, Ph.D. in Communication Sciences and Disorders (COMD) alumna Victoria Henbest, and long-time collaborator Yaacov Petscher, USC and Florida State University have signed a contract with Brookes Publishing to make the Morphological Awareness Test for Reading and Spelling (MATRS) available to researchers and practitioners.
Arriving at USC in 2012 to take on the role of chair for the COMD department, Apel already had a long history of research in the field of literacy. His work at the Arnold School helped spread the message that as the written form of language, literacy is an extremely important part of communication and speech-language pathology. He also increased awareness that literacy plays a central role in public health by serving as a gateway to career opportunities, healthcare access, social support, and many other factors that affect health outcomes.
As one of his areas of expertise, Apel was equally determined to advance the area of morphological awareness (MA). Educators and researchers have long known that MA skills influence whether students struggle to learn to read and write. However, its measurement – and even its definition – have historically made it difficult to address MA-related challenges.
“Morphological awareness is the ability to consciously consider and manipulate the smallest units of meaning in spoken and written language, like the base word, book, and even the prefixes and suffixes we attach to base words, like adding an s to make the plural word, books,” Apel says. “It’s important to be morphologically aware because our English written system is morphophonemic system, and prior research has shown that MA is strongly connected to reading and spelling success.”
MA helps children read unfamiliar words, understand word meanings, spell complex words correctly, and improve overall literacy skills. Yet, schools often do not assess MA directly – largely because they haven’t had tools to accurately and consistently measure it until now. Without standard benchmarks to compare students to their peers, researchers and professionals have been unable to identify the children who struggle with MA or determine if they have improved their skills following intervention efforts.
Apel’s work on MATRS began back in 2014, when he published a paper that would serve as the basis for the tool he would one day create. By 2017, he had secured funding from the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences to pursue the project. Apel and members of his Knowledge of Orthographic Learning Lab, including Henbest, began presenting the preliminary findings from their research project, and he was approached by Brookes in 2019 about bringing the assessment tool to market.
Though the COVID-19 pandemic caused some delays, the Department of Education granted the team two extensions, which allowed even more data to be collected and analyzed. Altogether, MATRS was tested on more than 5,400 students. Despite officially retiring, Apel continued working on MATRS until it was ready for launch in July of this year.
With USC and FSU receiving royalties, Brookes has made MATRS available to speech-language
pathologists, reading specialists, special educators, teachers, school psychologists
and others to assess the MA skills of children in grades 1-6 who are struggling with
reading, spelling, word recognition, and written language skills. The test takes about
35-45 minutes to complete, with each grade given four tasks that measure the four
different components of MA that Apel first identified back in his 2014 paper. There
are also two versions of the test so that students’ progress can be measured before
and after instruction or intervention.
In addition to aiding professionals in diagnosing and helping students who struggle
with MA, Apel hopes that by providing a standardized, research-based assessment, other
scientists can continue studying and expanding our understanding of MA. The timing
is also important for the dyslexia community, which includes approximately one in
five Americans along with their families, teachers, and other supporters.
“The International Dyslexia Association recently revised their definition of dyslexia to include MA,” Apel says. “While keeping in mind that dyslexia results from a complex combination of genetic, neurobiological, and environmental influences, experts now recognize that phonological and morphological processing challenges are a common feature as well. The availability of MATRS to assess underlying difficulties with morphological processing could be an important first step in identifying early oral and written language difficulties.”
MATRS’ utility in better understanding dyslexia is likely just the beginning of the tool’s applications. MA and its role in literacy development have always been important, but up until now, these areas have been misunderstood and poorly measured. With MATRS here to unlock the mysteries of MA, we are poised to enhance our knowledge of complex communication disorders in ways that were never possible before.