When is a corner like corn? Morpho-orthographic segmenting skills in children who struggle with reading

Abstract

Morphological awareness is the ability to consider and manipulate the smallest units of meaning in language. To measure it, a masked priming lexical decision task was used, where prime words varied, from morphologically related to the target (teacher-TEACH), to pseudo-suffixed relationships (corner-CORN). A dual-route theory of orthographic processing suggests that these words are processed differently; The former through coarse-grained processing, where the word is processed at once, and the latter through fine-grained, where each letter and its location is processed. For good readers in grade 6, letter order and suffix type modulated priming effects. For grade 6 poor readers and grade 2 readers, priming was not modulated by suffix type. For orthographic processing, grade 6 readers used fine-grained processing, whereas grade 2 readers used coarse-grained processing. This suggests that reading exposure is the driving factor in the type of orthographic processing used in word recognition for good and poor readers.