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Morphology is one of the organizing principles of the mental lexicon. It is especially important in Hebrew, where word structure expresses a rich array of semantic notions. This study investigated the ability of Hebrew-speaking children to solve written morphological analogies by reading and completing two sets of real and invented rootand pattern-related nouns using a closed set of responses. In the first experiment, 152 gradeschoolers (2nd-6th grade) were administered an analogy task with real words, where they had to read written stimuli and elicit root and pattern components from them. In the second experiment, 148 gradeschoolers were administered a similar reading task with pseudowords. In both experiments, the results clearly indicate an early and robust ability of Hebrew-speaking children to perform morphological analogies using both roots and patterns. Most errors involved the root morpheme rather than the pattern morpheme, but pseudowords elicited more pattern errors. These results are discussed in view of models of morphological processing and morpho-lexical development in Hebrew.

Research on dyslexia has focused on the phonological level of linguistic analysis. Here we extend the investigation of the linguistic competence of individuals with dyslexia to the morphological level of linguistic analysis. We examine whether adult Hebrew readers with dyslexia extract and represent morphemic units similarly to normal readers. Using the priming paradigm in the word fragment completion task, we measured the magnitude of morphological priming and contrasted this effect with the repetition priming effect. Students with normal reading ability showed the typical repetition priming effect. A comparable repetition priming effect was also found for the dyslexic group as a whole. However, when the dyslexics were classified into three subtypes according to their phonological and orthographic decoding skills, repetition priming effects were significant only for the phonological dyslexia subgroup but not for the surface or mixed dyslexia subgroups. Furthermore, students with normal reading ability showed strong morphological priming, comparable in strength to the repetition priming effect. In contrast, the dyslexic readers did not show morphological priming, neither the dyslexia group as a whole, nor any of the subgroups. Our results highlight an additional source for dyslexics' difficulties with word recognition which lie at the level of morphological processing.

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