Morpheme-Based Reading and Writing in Spanish Children with Dyslexia

Abstract

It has been well documented that morphemic structure (roots and affixes) have an impact in reading, but effects seem to depend on the reading experience of readers and lexical characteristics of the stimuli. Specifically, it has been reported that morphemes constitute reading units for developing readers and children with dyslexia when they encounter a new word. In addition, recent studies have stated that the effect of morphology is also present in spelling, as morphological information facilitates spelling accuracy and influences handwriting times. The goal of this study was to investigate the role of morphology in reading and spelling fluency in Spanish children with dyslexia. For that purpose, a group of 24 children with dyslexia was compared with an age-matched group of 24 children without reading disabilities in performing a word naming task and a spelling-to-dictation task of isolated words. Morphological condition (high frequency base, low frequency base, simple) and lexicality (words vs. pseudowords) were manipulated. We considered, for the naming task, reading latencies, reading durations, reading critical segment (three first phonemes) durations and naming accuracy; and, for the spelling task, written latencies, writing durations for the whole word, writing critical segment (three first letters) durations and spelling accuracy. Results showed that Spanish children (with and without dyslexia) benefit from a high frequency base to initiate reading and writing responses, showing that they are familiar with the letter chunks that constitute a morpheme. In addition, base frequency impacts reading critical segment duration only for children with dyslexia, but for both groups in writing. In summary, children with dyslexia benefit from a high frequency base to read and spell unfamiliar stimuli.

How morphology impacts reading and spelling: advancing the role of morphology in models of literacy development

“…Moreover, the study of morphology over the last two decades has revealed robust effects on word reading, spelling and reading comprehension across a wide array of languages (for review, see Deacon, Tong, & Mimeau, 2019). These include languages represented with alphabets that are highly phonologically transparent, such as Finnish (e.g., Bertram, Laine, & Virkkala, 2000; Lehtonen & Bryant, 2005), Spanish (e.g., D'Alessio, Jaichenco, & Wilson, 2018; Suárez‐Coalla, Martínez‐García, & Cuetos, 2017) and Italian (e.g., Angelelli, Marinelli, De Salvatore, & Burani, 2017), and those that are less so, such as French (Quémart et al, 2011). This extends to languages with more complex syllable structure, such as German (e.g., Hasenäcker, Schröter, & Schroeder, 2017), and those less so, such as Greek (e.g., Diamanti et al, 2017; Manolitsis, Grigorakis, & Georgiou, 2017) and Portuguese (e.g., Oliveira, Levesque, Deacon, & da Mota, 2020).…”

Non-phonological Strategies in Spelling Development

“…Learning to spell is a process of a phonological nature (Read, 1971;Treiman, 2004). There is substantial evidence, however, that accurate spelling also requires accessing and applying other types of knowledge beyond phonology, such as knowledge of morpheme-to-grapheme mappings (e.g., Nunes et al, 1997a;Pacton and Deacon, 2008) and of orthographic patterns consistent orthographies, such as Spanish (e.g., Defior et al, 2008: Suárez-Coalla et al, 2017, Italian (e.g., Angelelli et al, 2014Angelelli et al, , 2017, or Finnish (e.g., Lehtonen and Bryant, 2005). Defior et al (2008), for example, studied the spelling strategies of children who speak a regional dialect of Spanish (Andalusian) in which some consonant endings are not pronounced (e.g., /s/ in coda position).…”

The relationship between morphological awareness and reading comprehension in Spanish‐speaking children

“…For Spanish, the morphological knowledge that has an influence on the lexicon (i.e., decoding) is tacit morphological processing. The fact that tacit morphological processing allows for a faster and more accurate word decoding has been found in several studies in Spanish and Italian (Burani et al ., ; D'Alessio et al ., ; Jaichenco & Wilson, ; Marcolini et al ., ; Suárez‐Coalla & Cuetos, ; Suárez‐Coalla, Martínez‐García & Cuetos, ). On the other hand, the morphological knowledge that seems to influence the linguistic system is morphological awareness.…”