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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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This study investigated the development of automatic word recognition processes, in particular the development of the morphological level of processing. We examined masked priming of Hebrew irregular forms at two levels of reading experience. Both third-and seventh-grade children showed morphological priming for defective roots when primes and targets conformed to the canonical morphological structure, containing all three letters of the roots, and also when the surface form of the primes and targets contained only two of the root letters. However, priming was not observed when primes and targets did not overlap in the surface form of the roots, i.e. the full three-letter root as prime and only two root letters in the target. These results suggest that both tri-and bi-consonantal representations of defective roots exist in the mental lexicon of young readers. The formation of interconnections between these allomorphic representations, however, requires more extensive reading experience.Keywords Development · Mental lexicon · Morphological processing · Morphological priming · Word recognition Research on the linguistic knowledge of young children has focused on the ability of children to identify and manipulate sub-word morphemic units. This morphological knowledge, demonstrated in both oral and visual tasks, is acquired early and continues to develop throughout the years of elementary school (for a review, see