Morphological processing influences on dyslexia in Greek-speaking children

Abstract

The study explored the inflectional morphological awareness of Greek-speaking children with dyslexia in grade 3. The sample consisted of 24 dyslexic children and 32 chronological age-matched typically developing readers. All participants completed two oral experimental tasks of inflectional morphological awareness (i.e., verb inflections and noun-adjective inflections). The noun-adjective inflection task assessed children's ability to produce the plural of articles, adjectives, and nouns in the context of a sentence. The verb inflection task required children to change the tense of the verb in a sentence. Furthermore, phonological awareness and oral receptive vocabulary were assessed. Greek-speaking children with dyslexia faced difficulties in both inflectional tasks and in receptive vocabulary. They appeared to have greater difficulty in elicitation of non-past tense from past tense. Binary logistic regression targeted at understanding whether dyslexia can be predicted based on phonological and non-phonological oral language skills revealed that phonological awareness had a significant effect on distinguishing dyslexics from typically developing readers. Overall, our findings lead us to suggest that in an alphabetic language with a shallow orthographic system and rich morphology, children with dyslexia appear to have impaired inflectional morphological awareness and impaired vocabulary in comparison to their peers. Moreover, these results suggest the significance of teaching morphological skills in improving reading skills. However, further research is needed to substantiate these findings.

Keywords: Dyslexia; Greek language; Morphology; Phonology.