Morphological structure processing in Chinese dyslexic adolescents: An event related potential study

This study was to examine the morphological structure processing in Hong Kong Chinese adolescent readers with developmental dyslexia. A total of 16 adolescent readers with 8 dyslexics (ages 166-185 months, mean = 176.4) and 8 age-matched typically developing readers (ages 174-180 months, mean = 176.6) were given a priming lexical decision task involving Chinese compound words. For the typically developing readers, a smaller N400 was observed in the conditions where the primes and targets shared the same compounding structure as compared to those word pairs with different structures. In contrast, the dyslexic group showed no such differences across the experimental conditions for the N400 component. Findings suggest that Chinese adolescent readers with dyslexia may have a specific weakness in processing morphological information.