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, p honologic, and morphologic domains was tested in fifth-grade children with reading disabilities and compared with that of normally reading a ge-matched controls and with a 2-years-younger group of controls match ed with the reading disabled for vocabulary size. Ail testing involved speech. Children with reading disabilities were inferior to both cont rol groups in their ability to assign words to semantic categories, to identify the first phoneme in spoken words, and to judge the morpholo gic relationship between word pairs. Their relative impairment was mos t 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 v ocabulary-matched group, and both groups were inferior to the age-matc hed controls. It is concluded that the developmental reading-disabilit ies syndrome includes a deficit in the linguistic skills necessary for conscious application of linguistic rules in word perception and prod uction. This linguistic impairment may explain some of the reading com prehension problems as well as the difficulty in deciphering printed w ords.