SEMANTIC, PHONOLOGICAL, AND MORPHOLOGIC SKILLS IN READING-DISABLED AND NORMAL-CHILDREN - EVIDENCE FROM PERCEPTION AND PRODUCTION OF SPOKEN HEBREW

THE ABILITY to consciously use linguistic knowledge in the semantic, phonologic, and morphologic domains was tested in fifth-grade children with reading disabilities and compared with that of normally reading age-matched controls and with a 2-years-younger group of controls matched with the reading disabled for vocabulary size. Ail testing involved speech. Children with reading disabilities were inferior to both control groups in their ability to assign words to semantic categories, to identify the first phoneme in spoken words, and to judge the morphologic relationship between word pairs. Their relative impairment was most conspicuous in the morphologic domain. However, the number of words produced by the reading disabled according to semantic, phonologic, or morphologic constraints was similar to that produced by the younger vocabulary-matched group, and both groups were inferior to the age-matched controls. It is concluded that the developmental reading-disabilities syndrome includes a deficit in the linguistic skills necessary for conscious application of linguistic rules in word perception and production. This linguistic impairment may explain some of the reading comprehension problems as well as the difficulty in deciphering printed words.