What’s morphology got to do with it: oral reading fluency in adolescents with dyslexia

Lefèvre, E., Law, J. M. , Quémart, P., Anders, R. and Cavalli, E. (2022) What’s morphology got to do with it: oral reading fluency in adolescents with dyslexia. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, (doi: 10.1037/xlm0001163) (PMID:36006716) (Early Online Publication)

Abstract

Individuals with dyslexia often present phonological difficulties, ultimately impacting their reading and writing. Nevertheless, an individual with dyslexia may circumvent these difficulties through a reliance on linguistic units with more consistent spellings, such as morphemes. The increased use of morphological information by individuals with dyslexia has been argued to be a form of compensation. However, the contribution of morphological skills to reading fluency is still unclear. In this study, French adolescents with and without dyslexia were assessed on their morphological awareness and processing skills, along with reading fluency. Morphological awareness was assessed with a suffixation decision task, while a primed lexical decision task was used to assess morphological processing. Primes shared four possible relationships with the targets: morphological, semantic, orthographic, or unrelated. Group differences were not found for morphological awareness. In contrast, the group of adolescents with dyslexia showed a greater benefit of morphological priming. A continuous approach where reading fluency is seen as a broad spectrum was then used for future analyses. Benefits from morphological and orthographic priming were found to be inversely related to reading fluency. Morphological processing was found to be relatively high for individuals with low reading fluency proficiency, which suggests its use as a compensatory strategy in this population.

• Item Type: Articles
• Status: Early Online Publication
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Law, Dr Jeremy
• Authors: Lefèvre, E., Law, J. M., Quémart, P., Anders, R., and Cavalli, E.
• College/School: College of Social Sciences > School of Social & Environmental Sustainability
• Journal Name: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition
• Publisher: American Psychological Association
• ISSN: 0278-7393
• ISSN (Online): 1939-1285
• Published Online: 25 August 2022
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2022 American Psychological Association
• First Published: First published in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 2022
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced in accordance with the publisher copyright policy