The Specific Deficiency Of Morphological Awareness In Chinese Dyslexic Children

Combined with characteristics of the Chinese language, the study is aimed to explore the cognitive impairment mechanism of Chinese developmental dyslexia on two different levels, namely linguistic processing and basic cognitive processing, especially to examine the relationship between morphological awareness and the PASS, and to provide grounds for further integration of theoretical research and clinical intervention.In the present study, we selected forty Chinese children with dyslexia and seventy-two age-matched normal children in second to third grade from two elementary schools in Shanghai, who were administrated measures of linguistic processing (phonological awareness, morphological awareness, visual-orthographic skills, rapid automatized naming and verbal memory), basic cognitive processing (Cognitive Assessment System based on the PASS) and reading (characters recognition, reading fluency and reading comprehension). The results showed that:(1) Each component of linguistic processing had disproportionate level of effect on every indicator of reading. Morphological awareness had a strong influence on characters recognition and reading comprehension, but the influence decreased when vocabulary was controlled. Reading fluency could be explained by rapid automatized naming. Phonological awareness and verbal memory were insensitive to three indicators of reading.(2) Dyslexic children fell behind age-matched normal children in all the tasks of cognitive processing, especially in morphological construction, morphological production, vowel awareness and tone awareness, and in simultaneous-successive processing and attention.(3) Morphological awareness was closely related to reading in dyslexic children. Morphological judgment made an independent contribution to characters recognition and reading comprehension, while reading fluency could be explained by morphological production. Compared with age-matched normal children, each index of reading in dyslexic children had different level impairment in morphological awareness.(4) The PASS was lower related to reading than linguistic processing.(5) The PASS of dyslexic children made a unique contribution to morphological production and construction, and successive processing accounted for10.8%of the total variance to tone awareness. Meanwhile, simultaneous processing of normal children could account for5.5%to morphological judgment as well as successive processing for33.8%to vowel awareness. In addition, the PASS of dyslexic children effected higher on morphological construction than that of age-matched controls.