Morphological analogies in Hebrew speaking university students with dyslexia compared with typical developing gradeschoolers.

Little attention has been devoted to date to the study of morphological
knowledge in individuals with developmental dyslexia. The current study compares
the ability of Hebrew-speaking adult dyslexic students and gradeschool children to
analyze written words into theirmorphological components, using a linguistic analogy
task. Two sets of monolingual Hebrew-speaking participants-152 typically developing
gradeschool children and 38 undergraduate students diagnosed with reading
disabilities-were administered the Morphological Analogies Task. Results indicate
an early ability of normally developing children to perform morphological analogies,
while the adult dyslexic group performed on par with 3rd and 4th grade. Error
analysis revealed that the overwhelming majority of the erroneous responses in all
grades involved morphological strategies rather than the associative semantic strategy.
However, the adult dyslexic students had many more associative responses than
the graderschoolers. This testifies to the reduced written morphological abilities of
adult dyslexic students