Auditory Morphological Knowledge in Adults with Dyslexia: The Importance of Semantic Information

Despite an increase in studies investigating morphological knowledge in dyslexia, the connection between morphological and semantic knowledge is still unclear. This study investigated the effect of semantic information on the performance of Hebrew-speaking, high-achieving adults with and without dyslexia in two auditory tasks: a primed-lexical decision task and a morphological awareness tasks. We manipulated the level of semantic relatedness between stimuli and targets and assessed participants’ accuracy and response times. Finding from the first tasks indicate that although semantic information assisted both groups in increasing accuracy, it resulted in a reduction of response time only for the dyslexic participants. Findings from the second task indicate that although typically developing adults did not present any accuracy difference between the conditions, in the dyslexic group, accuracy was higher when primes and targets were semantically related. Overall, the present study suggests that dyslexics are assisted by semantics when processing morphologically complex words.