How orthographic transparency affects morphological processing in young readers with and without reading disability

Abstract

This study investigates how orthographic modifications to the stems of complex words affect morphological processing in proficient young Spanish readers and children with reading deficits. In a definition task all children, irrespective of their reading skill, were worse at defining derived words that had an orthographic alteration of the base stem than words with no orthographic alteration. In a go/no-go lexical decision task, an interaction between base frequency and orthographic alteration was found: base frequency affected derived words with no orthographic alteration more than words with alterations, irrespective of reading skill. Overall, results show that all children benefit from a high frequency base, skilled children outperform children with reading deficits and morphological processing is affected by orthographic alterations similarly in proficient and impaired readers.

Morphological effects in visual word recognition: Children, adolescents, and adults.

“…For example, the nonword namy combined the root name with the suffix y (orthographic shift), yet other items (e.g., waitery ) preserved the orthography of the root. While this is representative of the way derivational morphemes attach to stems in both English and French, there is evidence that children process words with an orthographic shift differently to words in which the stem is preserved ( Lázaro, García, & Burani, 2015 ), yet this was not controlled across languages or stimuli. The present study addresses these issues by matching morphologically- and nonmorphologically structured nonwords pairwise on length, summed log bigram frequency and number of orthographic neighbors, and ensuring orthographic transparency across all items.…”

The role of morphology in word naming in Spanish-speaking children

“…All other values were extracted from BuscaPalabras (Davis & Perea, 2005). All items were phonologically transparent (Lázaro, García, & Burani, 2015). Table 2 shows the descriptive statistics for the four groups of stimuli.…”

Orthographic consistency influences morphological processing in reading aloud: Evidence from a cross‐linguistic study

“…Also, the stems in the nonword items were often modified within and across languages inconsistently. This is problematic, because children seem to process morphologically complex words with modified stems differently than words with preserved stems (Lázaro, García, & Burani, 2015). We took these issues into consideration when constructing the stimuli for the present study.…”