Morphological awareness and visual processing of derivational morphology in high-functioning adults with dyslexia: An avenue to compensation?

Abstract

This study examined the processing of derivational morphology and its association with measures of morphological awareness and literacy outcomes in 30 Dutch-speaking high-functioning dyslexics, and 30 controls, matched for age and reading comprehension. A masked priming experiment was conducted where the semantic overlap between morphologically related pairs was manipulated as part of a lexical decision task. Measures of morphological awareness were assessed using a specifically designed sentence completion task. Significant priming effects were found in each group, yet adults with dyslexia were found to benefit more from the morphological structure than the controls. Adults with dyslexia were found to be influenced by both form (morpho-orthographic) and meaning (morphosemantic) properties of morphemes while controls were mainly influenced by morphosemantic properties. The reports suggest that morphological processing is intact in high-functioning dyslexics and a strength when compared to controls matched for reading comprehension and age. Thus, reports support morphological processing as a potential factor in the reading compensation of adults with dyslexia. However, adults with dyslexia performed significantly worse than controls on morphological awareness measures.

Grapheme-Phoneme Learning in an Unknown Orthography: A Study in Typical Reading and Dyslexic Children

“…Although phonological deficits have been demonstrated to account for a significant portion of the variance in reading by dyslexics, a significant portion of the variance remains unexplained. To account for this remaining variance recent studies have begun to explore alternative cognitive variables which may contribute for the literacy difficulties of individuals with dyslexia; such as orthographic processing (Ziegler et al, 2010 ; Boros et al, 2016 ) morphological awareness (Law et al, 2015 , 2018 ; Cavalli et al, 2017 ) or statistical learning (Krishnan et al, 2016 ; Schmalz et al, 2017 , Vandermosten et al, 2018 ). An additional factor that has been proposed to act as a critical bridge between the previously identified cognitive and behavioral deficits of individuals with dyslexia lays within the formation and integration of grapheme-phoneme mappings.…”

Morphological Deviations Produced by Indonesian Adolescent Dyslexic Readers

“…On the contrary, among the 80 words with affixes prepared, 22 of them were misread. Law, et al (2017) argued that a hierarchical structure of linguistic units is employed during early visual word processing in which the processing of smaller linguistic units is required to process larger-size units. He argued that such situation would ultimately limit the visual processing of morphemes, thus limiting the morphological process.…”

“…This implied that adolescent dyslexic readers may have difficulties in complex words which have affixes in it. Previous studies suggested that morphological awareness is related to word recognition (Kieffer, 2014;Cavalli, et al, 2017;Law, et al, 2017). Therefore, lacking morphological awareness might cause delayed ability in recognising words which reflected in their struggle, errors, or difficulties in reading.…”

“…A number of previous studies have found that morphological awareness is one of the contributing factors in decoding stage (Tong, et al, 2011;Kieffer, 2014). Morphological awareness can be related to word recognition (Law, et al, 2017) which is one of the tasks required to be accomplished during reading (Sprenger-Charoles & Cole, 2003in Berthiaume & Daigle, 2014. The deficiency in morphological awareness correlates with reading difficulties in language with alphabetic orthography (Casalis, Colé & Sopo, 2004;Burani, et al, 2008) as well as morphographic or morphosyllabic orthography such as Japanese language Hiragana and Kanji (Muroya, et al, 2017).…”

Geography Teachers’ Knowledge of and Perceptions on Dyslexia

“…Furthermore, this common learning disability involves about 80 percent of the learning disabled population, although the prevalence rate may differ from country to country [16]. Many researchers report that dyslexia is created by four causes: perceptual deficits [17][18][19][20][21], memory deficits [22,23], language processing deficits [7], and visual processing deficits [24][25][26]. Dyslexia does not only affect reading and writing but it has also been proved to cause topographic disorders and orientation problems [27][28][29][30].…”