Morphosyntactic Skills Influence the Written Decoding Accuracy of Italian Children With and Without Developmental Dyslexia

Abstract

Some types of developmental dyslexia (DD) are associated with morphology. Deep DD leads to morphological and semantic errors, and possible comorbidity with syntactic deficits; phonological-output-buffer DD causes problems in decoding longer morphologically complex words. In addition, cross-linguistic studies highlight the effects of morphological awareness on reading accuracy and fluency. The role of morphosyntactic abilities on reading is, however, not clear. This study explores the influence of morphosyntactic competence on reading in Italian children with and without DD. A total of 14 children with DD and 28 with Typical Development (TD) attending the Italian primary school were tested on written decoding, syntactic comprehension of different grammatical structures, and syntactic production of direct object clitic pronouns. DD children were significantly less accurate and slower in reading than TD children. Syntactic skills of the two groups did not differ significantly, but some differences in their acquisitional pace emerged. Syntactic comprehension and production of direct-object-clitic pronouns predicted reading accuracy standard scores, thus suggesting that morphosyntactic abilities, beyond clitics’ weak phonological status, affect decoding accuracy. Decoding accuracy was influenced by reading errors related to morphology (morphological, semantic, and phonological-output-buffer errors). Decoding speed was a specific weakness of DD children and was rather affected by multi-letter combinations. Consistent with a dual-route approach to orthographic processing, we argue that accuracy depends on fine-grained decoding strategies maximizing the precise ordering of letters, thus it is more sensitive to morphosyntactic skills. Morphological reading errors were associated with phonologically weak (determiners, clitic pronouns, and prepositions) and salient words (verbs). This suggests that the decoding of function words and morphologically complex words is particularly demanding and related to both phonological and morphosyntactic skills. Age had a negative predictive effect on semantic errors, compatible with the gradual acquisition of lexical decoding strategies, which seemed to be slowed down by DD. We conclude that oral morphosyntactic skills play a role in reading accuracy in the Italian shallow orthography for both DD and TD children. It is then advisable to assess children’s linguistic profile during DD diagnoses to establish whether some reading errors are related to morphosyntactic weakness. In this case, ad hoc morphosyntactic training might support reading accuracy.

Reading and spelling profiles of adult poor readers: Phonological, orthographic and morphological considerations

“…These exceptions make the English language a complex language system. There is some evidence that there is a strong positive association between morphological skills and reading and spelling performance in both children and adults (Farris, Cristan, Bernstein, & Odegard, 2021; Kotzer, Kirby, & Heggie, 2021; Tsesmeli & Seymour, 2006, see Casani, Vulchanova, & Cardinaletti, 2022 for similar relationship between morphosyntax and reading in a shallow orthographic language). In children, morphological awareness supports decoding skills, word recognition, and word comprehension (Mahony, Singson, & Mann, 2000; Nagy, Berninger, & Abbott, 2006).…”

Analysis of spelling errors from the ‘dyslexic sight words’ list

“…Manifestations of dyslexia vary among languages ( Goulandris, 2003 ; Casani et al, 2022 ), subjects, and ages ( Vellutino et al, 2004 ; Hasenäcker et al, 2020 ). This is also observed in studies with dyslexics in other languages, such as Italian ( Casani et al, 2022 ), French ( Joye et al, 2020 ; Bodard et al, 2023 ), Spanish ( Rello et al, 2014 ; Afonso et al, 2022 ), German ( Rauschenberger et al, 2016 ), and English ( Bourassa and Treiman, 2003 ; Joye et al, 2020 ). For instance, the misspelling rate in dyslexic children is higher than in adults ( Mazur-Palandre, 2018 ).…”