Morphological Awareness in Brazilian Learners with Developmental Dyslexia

Abstract

There is consistent empirical support that demonstrates the relationship between phonological deficits of developmental dyslexics and their reading difficulties. However, the morphological skills—which also play an important role in the development of alphabetic writing—are seldom investigated among children and adolescents with dyslexia. The focus of this study was to analyse reading patterns according to the dual route model and verify the performance of each subtype of dyslexic in tests of morphological awareness. Participants were nine students classified as surface or phonological dyslexics through their performance in an isolated words-reading task. Four tests were applied to the participants to assess their knowledge of derivational morphology, and two tests focused on their knowledge of inflectional morphology. The hypothesis that guided this research was that students with different reading patterns would also present different performances on morphological tests. This hypothesis was confirmed only for derivational morphology, in which a higher performance was observed among participants with phonological dyslexia. It is concluded that metamorphological skills may serve as facilitators of reading in students with developmental dyslexia, and a focus on the development of these skills is suggested as a strategy to promote the reading skills of these students.