Exploring the inflectional morphology in Greekreading disabled childrenKyriakoula RothouUniversity of Thessaloniki, Greecekyriakirothou@gmail.comTo explore the inflectional morphologicalawareness of children with reading disabilitiesin an orthographically transparent language:Greek language. There is a limited researchin languages with shallow orthography andso our study will add in the field of readingdevelopment and reading disabilities.Participants consisted of 15 children withreading disability (RD) in the third grade and27 age-matched children with normal readingskills (NR).RD children scored below the 30thpercentile in decoding and above the 40thpercentile in reading comprehension. Thenoun–adjective inflection task assessed theability of children to produce the plural ofarticles, adjectives, and nouns in the context of asentence.The verb inflection task used asked children tochange the tense of the verb in a sentence. Bothtasks were orally presented. Non-parametrictechniques were used for analysis. There weresignificant differences between the two readinggroups on two inflectional morphology tasks(Mann-Whitney tests, p<.001). Both tasks weredifficult for the children with reading difficulties,and especially the verb inflections (Wilcoxontest, p<.001). Interestingly, the normallydeveloping readers differed in their performanceon two tasks (Wilcoxon test, p<.001). It issuggested that Greek speaking third gradechildren with reading disabilities have poorinflectional morphological awareness skills,while age-matched readers have developedthese skills.
