Morphological processing in Hebrew-speaking students with reading disabilities

Marking number/gender agreement on Hebrew adjectives is a case in point: It is a challenging task requiring lexical and grammatical insight, a well-known source of processing errors in Hebrew usage. The current study examined impaired processing of noun and adjective inflection in adult speakers of Hebrew with dyslexia. Thirty normally reading university students, 30 university students with dyslexia, and 30 normally reading sixth-grade students were administered a production task on noun-adjective pluralization. Accuracy of noun form and adjective agreement were measured, as well as reaction time to producing the whole plural noun phrase. Of interest was the contrast between forms involving a stem change and forms taking a predictable (regular) versus idiosyncratic (irregular) suffix. The study found that individuals with dyslexia tended to be slower and less accurate overall, though the extent of this impairment was somewhat more pronounced for irregular forms and forms involving a stem change. Performance was also compared to younger controls (sixth graders) and indicated ways in which these deficits could versus could not be explained by their relative reading experience.