Academic Achievements of College Graduates With Learning Disabilities Vis-a-Vis Admission Criteria and Academic Support.

Postsecondary entrance examination scores are generally low predictors of college achievement (grade point average [GPA]) for students with learning disabilities (LD). The difficulties with meeting academic requirements have raised the awareness of the needs of students with LD for support services. The present study examined the adequacy of entrance criteria to academic studies for students with LD and the effectiveness of three support levels during their academic studies in increasing their academic gains. Data were collected for 315 college graduates with LD and 955 graduates who do not have LD (NLD) who completed their BA studies in a college in Israel. Although the admission scores of graduates with LD were lower than those of NLD graduates, their GPA was higher than the GPA of NLD graduates. The psychometric score had a low correlation with final college GPA of graduates with LD. There was no difference in the final GPA of the graduates with LD in the different support programs. The findings suggest that academic support can be an effective way to help students with LD to eliminate or close the gap between them and NLD students and to earn an academic degree, regardless of what if any admission criteria were applied to them.

Deficient morphological processing in adults with developmental dyslexia: another barrier to efficient word recognition?

Research on dyslexia has focused on the phonological level of linguistic analysis. Here we extend the investigation of the linguistic competence of individuals with dyslexia to the morphological level of linguistic analysis. We examine whether adult Hebrew readers with dyslexia extract and represent morphemic units similarly to normal readers. Using the priming paradigm in the word fragment completion task, we measured the magnitude of morphological priming and contrasted this effect with the repetition priming effect. Students with normal reading ability showed the typical repetition priming effect. A comparable repetition priming effect was also found for the dyslexic group as a whole. However, when the dyslexics were classified into three subtypes according to their phonological and orthographic decoding skills, repetition priming effects were significant only for the phonological dyslexia subgroup but not for the surface or mixed dyslexia subgroups. Furthermore, students with normal reading ability showed strong morphological priming, comparable in strength to the repetition priming effect. In contrast, the dyslexic readers did not show morphological priming, neither the dyslexia group as a whole, nor any of the subgroups. Our results highlight an additional source for dyslexics' difficulties with word recognition which lie at the level of morphological processing.

The contribution of frequency and semantic similarity to morphological processing.

This research investigated the role of frequency and semantic factors in the processing of morphologically complex words. Unaffixed targets were immediately preceded by either inflected or derived primes that were either high or low in frequency. In Experiment 1, low-frequency inflections and derivations produced equivalent priming effects, whereas high-frequency inflections produced more priming than derivations. In Experiment 2, both semantic and morphological priming varied as a function of SOA (50, 150, and 250 ms). The difference in priming of inflections and derivations increased as SOA increased. Results suggest that frequency and semantic similarity interactively modulate the magnitude of morphological priming and, by inference, affect the processing of morphologically complex words. Dual-route and connectionist accounts are discussed.