Elisabeth Arnbak

The role of morpheme recognition and morphological awareness in dyslexia

This paper begins by presenting theoretical arguments and empirical evidence to support the idea that morpheme analysis strategies play a part in word recognition in reading, and in dyslexia in particular. The results of two studies are presented which indicate that dyslexic adolescents use recognition of root morphemes as a compensatory strategy in reading of both single words and coherent text. Furthermore, the evidence is reviewed that the use of morpheme recognition as a strategy in reading to some extent depends on the linguistic awareness of morphemes in spoken language. Finally, results from a pilot study of the effects of morphological awareness training of dyslexic students are presented which suggest that it may be possible to improve the awareness of morphology independently of phoneme awareness, and that such a training may have positive effects on reading of coherent text and on the accurate spelling of morphologically complex words.

Teaching Morphological Awareness to Dyslexic Students

Morphemes are the smallest meaningful units of language. In the word babysitter there are three morphemes: baby-sitt-er, and in the word unforgetfulness there are five: un-for-get-fulness. The meaning of a word is, more or less clearly, the combined meanings of the morphemes of that particular word. Four different types of morphemes are used in the formation of words: root morphemes, prefixes, suffixes, and inflections. Root morphemes may be words in themselves; there are at least one root in every word (sleeping, dreamed, cats, a reader, brownish). The other three types of morphemes are bound morphemes, meaningful units of words, but never words in themselves. Prefixes change the meaning of a root, but not its grammatical class (unhappy, forgiving, behold). Suffixes change both the meaning and the grammatical class of a root (a reader, forgetful, unforgettable, sweeten), and inflections add information about, for example, number, gender, and tense (cars, helped, loving, larger).