Morphological Awareness and Its Role in Compensation in Adults with Dyslexia

Abstract

This study examines the role of morphological awareness (MA) in literacy achievement and compensation in word reading of adults with dyslexia through an exploration of three questions: (1) Do adult dyslexics demonstrate a deficit in MA, and how is this potential deficit related to phonological awareness (PA)? (2) Does MA contribute independently to literacy skills equally in dyslexics and control readers? and (3) Do MA and PA skills differ in compensated and noncompensated dyslexics? A group of dyslexic and normal reading university students matched for age, education and IQ participated in this study. Group analysis demonstrated an MA deficit in dyslexics; as well, MA was found to significantly predict a greater proportion of word reading and spelling within the dyslexic group compared with the controls. Compensated dyslexics were also found to perform significantly better on the morphological task than noncompensated dyslexics. Additionally, no statistical difference was observed in MA between the normal reading controls and the compensated group (independent of PA and vocabulary). Results suggest that intact and strong MA skills contribute to the achieved compensation of this group of adults with dyslexia. Implications for MA based intervention strategies for people with dyslexia are discussed.

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.…”

“…divide and division, invade and invasion), while gains in PA and an increased sensitivity to the phonemic structure of language aid in the learning of morphophonemic rules, thus furthering morphological learning (Carlisle & Nomanbhoy, 1993). (Cavalli et al, 2016;Law et al, 2015).…”

Phonemic—Morphemic dissociation in university students with dyslexia: an index of reading compensation?

“…Thus, few studies have been conducted on morphological knowledge (using both explicit morphological awareness tasks and implicit morphological processing tasks) among university students with dyslexia and even fewer have investigated morphological awareness specifically. To our knowledge, only two of the existing studies were conducted in an alphabetic writing system (for the English orthography, see Law, Wouters, and Ghesquière, 2015; for the French orthography, see Martin, Frauenfelder, and Colé, 2013), and two examined Hebrew-speaking university students with dyslexia (Leikin & Zur Hagit, 2006;Schiff & Raveh, 2007). Furthermore, although some other studies have assessed morphological awareness in English (e.g., Tractenberg, 2002;Leong, 1999), these studies examined populations with learning disabilities, including participants who presented with deficits other than developmental dyslexia.…”

“…One can make the assumption that they have built a compensatory reading system using other, fully intact, language and possibly cognitive abilities. This approach is innovative compared to the majority of studies which describe only deficits among these students (but see Cavalli, Casalis, El Ahmadi, Zira, Poracchia-George, and Colé, 2016, for vocabulary skills;Law, Wouters, andGhesquière, 2015 andLeong, 1999, for morphological knowledge;and Romani et al, 2008, for verbal learning).…”

Morphological Awareness and Recall of Passive Vocabulary in Adult Learners

“…Recent studies incorporating college students have demonstrated positive results using morpheme knowledge to infer the meaning of unknown words (To, Tighe, and Binder, 2016;Paiman, Thai, and Yuit, 2015;Law, Wouters, and Ghesquiere, 2015;Jiang, Kuo, and Sonnenburg-Winkler, 2015). Less studied is the use of morphemes to serve as mnemonics for recalling morphologically complex vocabulary introduced as part of a curriculum.…”