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Cycle BCL - Chiara Melloni

Playing with nonwords: Morphological skills in developmental dyslexia

14 novembre 2019 - Salle Plate

While phonological and morphological abilities are both crucial for the acquisition of reading, morphology has been found to play a pivotal role especially at later stages of literacy acquisition, as established by several studies finding correlations between morphological skills and reading achievements in alphabetic orthographies (Brittain 1970; Tornéus 1987; Carlisle 1995). On the other side, research on reading impaired populations showed that their morphological abilities are severely compromised (Elbro & Arnbak 1996). In particular, deficits have been found in tasks assessing the abilities to isolate and blend morphemes (Casalis et al. 2004), in gender and number agreement (Jiménez et al. 2004; Rispens 2004) and in several other domains of inflectional morphology (Joanisse et al. 2000).
In view of the above, the present study aimed to address the following questions: 1. Is there (and what is the extent of) the dyslexic disadvantage across domains of Italian inflectional and derivational morphology? 2. Which are the most problematic domains for dyslexic children? 3. Are morphological skills able to predict reading proficiency?

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