Modality effects in the representation of the root morpheme in the mental lexicon of Hebrew-speaking adults with dyslexia

There is a relatively broad consensus among scholars that readers with dyslexia have deficits in their phonological processing abilities. However, recent data has indicated that they may also score lower than skilled readers on tasks assessing their morphological knowledge. The main goal of this chapter is to review selected studies investigating the performance of Hebrew-speaking, high-achieving adults with dyslexia compared with skilled adult readers during a visual and auditory morphological primed-lexical decision task. The chapter aims to describe the conditions in which adults with dyslexia use morphological information, and whether they differ from controls in how morpho-semantic and morpho-orthographic information influences this facilitation. As will be further shown, in studies that utilized the visual modality, neither readers with dyslexia (neither the dyslexia group as a whole nor any of the subgroups) showed the morphological priming seen in both age- and reading-level control students. Conversely, when words were presented in the auditory modality, readers with dyslexia performed similarly to the age- and reading-matched control groups. The fact that morphological priming is not observed with visual presentation but is observed with auditory presentation serves as evidence for intact central morphological processes in adults with dyslexia that can support such auditory priming effects. The conclusions of this review align with the notion that morphological processing abilities among adults with dyslexia are modality and task dependent.