Morphological awareness in dyslexic university students

Abstract

This research assessed phonological and morphological awareness in dyslexic university students. We tested 44 dyslexic university students in phonological and morphological awareness tasks and compared their performances to those of both matched chronological age and matched reading level controls. In the phonological awareness tests, the dyslexic university students performed at the same level as their reading level controls. In contrast, they systematically outperformed their reading level controls in the morphological awareness tasks and almost reached the proficiency level of the chrono- logical age controls. The results show that dyslexic university students develop their morphological awareness more than their phonological awareness. These findings add to the evidence indicating that morphological awareness is not deficient in dyslexia and could instead play a beneficial role in the development of literacy skills in this populatio

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.…”

“…Then, to assess morphological knowledge, we administered two computer-driven oral tasks developed by Martin et al (2013) to measure performance speed and accuracy. These tasks have been designed to require a minimum of phonological analysis (i.e., the level of phonological difficulty was low) and all of the monomorphemic items used were composed of a suffix-like ending (e.g., mistral [mistral], bretelle [strap]).…”

“…In both morphological awareness tasks, the psycholinguistic properties of the materials were controlled for written and spoken frequency according to the Lexique database (New, Pallier, 13 Ferrand, & Matos, 2001), and also for word endings, number of syllables and grammatical class (see Martin et al (2013) for further information about the stimuli and the experimental procedure). Prior to testing, the experimenter informed participants about the definition of suffixes and trained them on the distinction between suffixed and non-suffixed word using five practice items for each category with feedback.…”

“…Therefore, in French, dyslexic adult readers may take full advantage of the semantic information conveyed by morphemes and strongly activate morphological knowledge while reading words. To our knowledge, only one study has evaluated the morphological awareness of French university students with dyslexia (Martin et al, 2013). These authors investigated the level of oral morphological and phonological awareness among university students with dyslexia in comparison to both CA and RL controls.…”

“…However, while Martin et al (2013) used oral tasks to measure morphological awareness, Law et al used written tasks (i.e., paper-and-pencil word and nonword sentence completion tasks), potentially confounding a predictor of reading (i.e., morphological awareness) with reading itself. Thus, the possibility cannot be excluded that the weakness that the authors observed in morphological awareness among the dyslexic sample was due not to a deficit in morphological awareness per se but to the acknowledged deficit in reading.…”