Morphological awareness in developmental dyslexia

Abstract

This study examines morphological awareness in developmental dyslexia. While the poor phonological awareness of dyslexic children has been related to their difficulty in handling the alphabetical principle, less is known about their morphological awareness, which also plays an important part in reading development. The aim of this study was to analyze in more detail the implications of the phonological impairments of dyslexics in dealing with larger units of language such as morphemes. First, the performance of dyslexic children in a series of morphological tasks was compared with the performance of children matched on reading-level and chronological age. In all the tasks, the dyslexic group performed below the chronological age control group, suggesting that morphological awareness cannot be developed entirely independently of reading experience and/or phonological skills. Comparisons with the reading-age control group indicated that, while the dyslexic children were poorer in the morphemic segmentation tasks, they performed normally for their reading level in the sentence completion tasks. Furthermore, they produced more derived words in the production task. This suggests that phonological impairments prevent the explicit segmentation of affixes while allowing the development of productive morphological knowledge. A second study compared dyslexic subgroups defined by their degree of phonological impairment. Our results suggest that dyslexics develop a certain type of morphological knowledge which they use as a compensatory reading strategy.

Early development and predictors of morphological awareness: Disentangling the impact of decoding skills and phonological awareness

“…In this study, we will retrospectively reclassify these participants based on literacy difficulties that were observed in second grade to determine MA deficits' relation to the behaviorally observed literacy difficulties across time. Based on the findings of Law et al, (2016) demonstrated early MA deficits of high-risk children along with past research showing MA deficits in poor and dyslexic readers later in life (Casalis, Colé, & Sopo, 2004;Fowler, Liberman, & Feldman, 1995;Law, et al, 2015, Robertson, Joanisse, Desroches, & Terry, 2012Tsesmeli & Seymour, 2006), we expect to find an association between literacy difficulties and MA deficits across all time points of this longitudinal study, from kindergarten to second grade.…”

“…Research across a multitude of languages and age groups has found that dyslexics often underperform across a variety of measures of MA when compared with chronologically age-matched peers while, at the same time, being found to perform similar to or better than younger reading age-matched controls (Casalis, Colé, & Sopo, 2004;Fowler, Liberman, & Feldman, 1995;Robertson, Joanisse, Desroches, & Terry, 2012;Tsesmeli & Seymour, 2006). These findings suggest that MA deficits are not causal to dyslexic's reading struggles and may be a consequence of poor reading experience or a more primary deficit, like the phonological deficit often associated with dyslexia.…”

Not all phonological awareness deficits are created equal: evidence from a comparison between children with Otitis Media and poor readers

“…It is well established that morphological awareness can predict progress in reading and spelling independently from phoneme awareness (Siegel, 2008) and that training in morphological awareness can improve literacy outcomes (Bowers, Kirby, & Deacon, 2010; Goodwin & Ahn, 2013). However, it is also known that there is a close association between phonological awareness and morphological awareness (Casalis, Colé, & Sodo, 2004; Cunningham & Carroll, 2015). …”

Effects of Orthographic, Morphological and Semantic Overlap on Short-Term Memory for Words in Typical and Atypical Development

“…Children with dyslexia have been shown to perform below chronological-age-(CA-) matched peers on morphological awareness measures in many languages (Berthiaume & Daigle, 2014;Carlisle, 1987;Casalis et al, 2004;Duranovic, Tinjak, & Turbic-Hadzagic, 2014;Egan & Pring, 2004;Egan & Tainturier, 2011;Joanisse, Manis, Keating, & Seidenberg, 2000;Leong, 1999;McBride-Chang et al, 2008;McBride-Chang, Liu, Wong, Wong, & Shu, 2012;Shu, McBride-Chang, Wu, & Liu, 2006;Siegel, 2008;Tsesmeli & Seymour, 2006;Vogel, 1977). They have also been shown to use morphological processes (in reading and spelling) less than age-matched peers Carlisle, Stone, & Katz, 2001;Fisher, Shankweiler, & Liberman, 1985;Hauerwas & Walker, 2003;Leong, 1989).…”

“…To examine whether children with dyslexia show atypical morphological processing given their level of literacy skills, a better comparison is against younger, reading-ability-matched peers. For the most part, children with dyslexia perform similarly to reading-ability-matched children on oral measures of morphological awareness (Casalis et al, 2004;Egan & Pring, 2004;Egan & Tainturier, 2011;Robertson, Joanisse, Desroches, & Terry, 2012;Tsesmeli & Seymour, 2006). However, the picture for morphological processing is less clear.…”