Visual and auditory morphological priming in adults with developmental dyslexia

The quality of implicit morphological knowledge in adult Hebrew readers with developmental dyslexia was investigated. The priming paradigm was used to examine whether these adults extract and represent morphemic units similarly to normal readers during online word recognition. The group with dyslexia as a whole did not exhibit priming with visual presentation as opposed to both age- and reading-level controls. Priming was absent when the prime and target words shared a morpheme and even when the prime and the target were identical. Only the students with phonological dyslexia, who exhibited relatively good performance in the orthographic judgment task, exhibited repetition priming but not morphological priming. Strong repetition and morphological priming effects were found for participants with dyslexia when the stimuli were auditory. The implications of the dissociation between visual and auditory priming for the locus of the deficit in morphological processing during word recognition are discussed.