How do roots and suffixes influence reading of pseudowords: A study of young Italian readers with and without dyslexia

Abstract

The study explored the different influences of roots and suffixes in reading aloud morphemic pseudowords (e.g., vetr-ezza, ''glass-ness''). Previous work on adults showed a facilitating effect of both roots and suffixes on naming times. In the present study, pseudoword stimuli including roots and suffixes in different combinations were administered to sixth-grade children with dyslexia (N022) and skilled readers (N044), matched for chronological age. Indeed, the sequential reading strategy of less proficient readers (particularly for pseudowords) should favour the emergence of differences between left and right constituents (root and suffix, respectively) in reading performance. Results showed that for both children with dyslexia and skilled young readers the onset of pronunciation depended exclusively on roots, while there was no significant effect of suffixes. However, both roots and suffixes led to higher levels of accuracy than matched orthographic strings of letters. Posthoc regression analyses confirmed the morphological nature of the root and suffix effects, over and above the effects of the frequency of their orthographic patterns. Results indicate that the position of the reading units within the letter string, as well as their differential effects on latencies and accuracy, should be taken into account by models of morphological processing in word recognition and reading and by applied intervention research.

Is Morphological Awareness a Relevant Predictor of Reading Fluency and Comprehension? New Evidence From Italian Monolingual and Arabic-Italian Bilingual Children

“…The pattern of results in the L1 beginning readers approached previous studies suggesting that decomposition of complex words (or even multi-morphemic non-words) into morphemic units supports reading ability in younger readers (Burani et al, 2008;Marcolini et al, 2011;Traficante et al, 2011). According to the above-mentioned literature, morpheme-based reading might allow children to read units smaller than the whole word, but bigger than the grapheme or the syllable (see, for instance, Angelelli et al, 2014).…”

Morpheme‐based Reading and Spelling in Italian Children with Developmental Dyslexia and Dysorthography

“…Nevertheless, there is evidence of morpheme-based reading in Italian students with dyslexia (Burani et al, 2008;Marcolini et al, 2011;Traficante et al, 2011), but no indications are present for the spelling process. In Italian, the regularity of the grapheme-to-phoneme and phoneme-to-grapheme mappings is in principle sufficient to process correctly most words; thus, morphological units may not be necessary for reading and spelling accuracy.…”

“…A series of studies demonstrated that morpheme-based reading is effective in secondary-school Italian readers with dyslexia (Burani, Marcolini, De Luca, & Zoccolotti, 2008;Traficante et al, 2011). These students read aloud pseudowords made up of a root and a derivational suffix (e.g.…”

“…These students read aloud pseudowords made up of a root and a derivational suffix (e.g. Finally, the presence of morphemes positively affected reading accuracy for pseudowords (Burani et al, 2008;Traficante et al, 2011), but not in the case of words, irrespective of word frequency or reading skill (Burani et al, 2008;Marcolini et al, 2011). dennosto; Burani et al, 2008).…”

Socio-emotional and cognitive resilience in children with reading disabilities

“…One study of “compensated” dyslexic university students – where “compensated” is defined as those achieving higher than expected literacy in light of phonological deficits – showed that students’ strengths in morphological awareness were associated with improved reading outcome [37]. Other studies have similarly found that children with RD can rely on morphological structure to decode words faster, despite decoding difficulties [38,39]. Vocabulary skills have also been implicated as a compensatory mechanism for college students with RD [40], and have been shown to mediate between impaired verbal working memory and oral reading fluency in adolescents with RD [41].…”