Morphological awareness skills of Norwegian adolescent dyslexics acquiring English as a second language

Abstract

The aim of this study was twofold: (a) to investigate the morphological and phonological awareness skills of a group of Norwegian high school students with dyslexia, and (b) to examine the relationship of these two linguistic abilities to students’ reading comprehension skills. To this end, we compared the performance of a dyslexic sample to that of a chronological-age matched control group on three language and literacy tests: A morphological awareness test consisting of two subtests on derivational suffixes (the real-word and the pseudoword tests), a phonological awareness test based on phoneme and syllable deletion, and a reading comprehension test comprised of nine texts followed by multiple-choice questions. Results revealed that the dyslexia group in general did considerably worse than the control group on all the tasks administered in the study. However, results also indicated that, compared to controls, dyslexic participants exhibited a much larger within-group variation in terms of their accuracy on the tests. As for the relationships between reading comprehension performance and morphological awareness vs. phonological awareness skills, the present results suggested that reading comprehension skills were more closely related with morphological awareness than with phonological awareness in both the dyslexic and the control group.