Morphological Processing in Children with Developmental Dyslexia: A Visual Masked Priming Study

Abstract

This study examined the processing of derivational morphology and its association with early phonological skills of 24 Dutch-speaking children with dyslexia and 46 controls matched for age. A masked priming experiment was conducted where the semantic overlap between morphologically related pairs was manipulated as part of a lexical decision task. Results suggest that morphological processing is intact in children with dyslexia when compared to age-matched controls. Significant priming effects were found in each group. Children with dyslexia were found to solely benefit from the morpho-semantic information, while the morpho-orthographic form the properties of morphemes-influenced controls. Due to the longitudinal nature of the data set, an examination of early phonological awareness’s role in the later development of morphological processing skills was possible. In line with the psycholinguistic grain-size theory, fifth-grade morphological processing in children with dyslexia was found to be negatively correlated to earlier second-grade PA skills. A similar relation was not found among the controls. Results indicate a potential shift in the cognitive processes involved during reading to compensate for the observed phonological deficits of children with dyslexia.