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Inflectional morphology and dyslexia: Italian children’s performance in a nonword pluralization task

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Abstract

In this study, we present the results of an original experimental protocol designed to assess the performance in a pluralization task of 52 Italian children divided into two groups: 24 children with developmental dyslexia (mean age 10.0 years old) and 28 typically developing children (mean age 9.11 years old). Our task, inspired by Berko’s Wug Test, had the aim of testing the subjects’ ability to apply pluralization rules to nonwords in the morphologically complex context of Italian nominal inflection. Results demonstrate that dyslexics display poorer morphological skills in comparison to controls, showing lower accuracy in the task. Furthermore, the dissimilar performances reported by the subjects in the different conditions indicate that the ability to inflect nonwords depends on factors such as the rule’s productivity, frequency, and opacity with respect to gender. Finally, the children’s performance in this task was significantly related to their reading proficiency, and it could predict accuracy in word reading independently of phonological awareness and working memory.

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Notes

  1. Other studies adopt a different perspective on dyslexia, by putting an emphasis on visual and perceptual problems (see Landerl & Wimmer, 2000; Marinelli, Angelelli, Di Filippo, & Zoccolotti, 2011 for a discussion).

  2. Other studies report instead that dyslexics’ morphological awareness skills are poorer than those of their chronological age-matched peers but similar to that of reading age-matched children (see Deacon, Tong, & Mimeau, 2016 for a review).

  3. Similarly, Martin, Frauenfelder, and Colé (2014) found that dyslexic adults performed better than their reading age-matched controls and similarly to chronological age-matched controls in morphological skills, whereas they still displayed difficulties in phonological awareness tasks, thus suggesting on the one side that morphological competence has a longer developmental trajectory than phonological awareness and confirming, on the other side, that morphological skills could play a role in helping to compensate for their reading difficulties.

  4. Whereas feminine stems in -a have the corresponding plural form ending in -e (cas-a > cas-e ‘house’), masculine nouns ending in -a have their plurals in -i (poet-a > poet-i ‘poet’).

  5. Eliciting the article is particularly useful to interpret the results of the task with (Italian) nonwords. For instance, if the child is asked to produce the plural of il treda, which is a masculine invented noun belonging to class IV, and she utters le trede, with the feminine article and the ending in -e which is typically feminine, instead of the target plural i tredi with the masculine article, we can infer that she failed to identify the masculine gender of the nonword, treating it as a class 1 feminine. The presence of the determiner permits us to say that her error in this case is not that of applying a nonexistent rule of Italian (e.g., masculine nouns ending in -a for the singular take the ending in -e for the plural) but that of changing the gender of the nonword (which could be related, as will be pointed out in the discussion, to the low frequency of masculine nouns ending in -a). Without the article, it would not be possible to draw such inference.

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Acknowledgments

The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement no 613465. We are grateful to Patrizia Cordin, Serena Dal Maso, Shenai Hu, Theodor Marinis, and Anne Reboul for the fruitful discussions on the preliminary results of this work. We are also indebted to the two anonymous reviewers and to the editors of this journal for their sharp suggestions that have contributed to the final shape of this paper. Lastly, we cannot forget all the children, their parents, and the directors and staff of the local health authorities and schools that participated in these studies: Azienda Provinciale per i Servizi Sanitari di Trento (Neuropsichiatria Infantile), Istituti Comprensivi di Bassa Anaunia, Cles, Revò, Taio and Tuenno (Trento), and Scuola “Massalongo” in Verona. We send them our utmost gratitude for their kind and valuable cooperation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Verona, Verona, Italy

    Maria Vender, Silvia Savazzi, Denis Delfitto & Chiara Melloni

  2. University of Trento, Trento, Italy

    Federica Mantione

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  1. Maria Vender
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  2. Federica Mantione
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  3. Silvia Savazzi
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Contributions

MV conceived the project with support of CM and DD. MV designed the experiment, collected the data and analyzed the results with the supervision of CM and SS. MV and CM interpreted the results with support of DD and FM. MV and CM wrote the paper. All the authors revised the work critically for important intellectual content and gave the final approval of the version to be published.

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Correspondence to Maria Vender.

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Vender, M., Mantione, F., Savazzi, S. et al. Inflectional morphology and dyslexia: Italian children’s performance in a nonword pluralization task. Ann. of Dyslexia 67, 401–426 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11881-017-0152-8

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