Speaker
Jeremy Law
(KU Leuven)
Description
This study examined processing of derivational morphology and its association with measures of morphological awareness and literacy outcomes in 30 Dutch speaking high-functioning dyslexics, defined as university students with a past diagnosis of dyslexia with age appropriate reading comprehension skills, and 30 age-matched Dutch speaking controls, matched for reading comprehension. A masked priming experiment was conducted where semantic overlap between morphologically related pairs was manipulated as part of a lexical decision task. Measures of morphological awareness were assessed with a sentence completion task, specifically designed for this study. Significant priming effects were found in each group, yet adults with dyslexia were found to benefit more from the morphological structure than controls. Results suggest that morphological processing is intact in high-functioning dyslexics and also a strength compared to controls matched on reading comprehension and age. Furthermore, dyslexics were found to be influenced by both form and meaning properties of morphemes while controls were mainly influenced by morpho-semantic properties. Moreover, adults with dyslexia were found to perform significantly poorer than controls on morphological awareness measures. Morpho-semantic priming effects were found to correlate with the performance on time sensitive literacy measures in adults with dyslexia, a similar pattern was not observed in controls.
Primary author
Jeremy Law
(KU Leuven)
Co-authors
Anneli Veispak
(KU Leuven)
Pol Ghesquiere
(KU Leuven)
