The influence of orthography on Dutch children’s past tense production
Summary
Background:
Dyslexia is a language-based disorder. It probably stems from an underlying phonological
deficit, which results in problems with phonological tasks. Besides that, research has shown
that dyslexics also have subtle language impairments. The present study looked into the
morpho-phonological process of past tense inflection and the impact of orthography.
Aims:
The main purpose was to compare the results of 9-year-old normal and poor readers on a past
tense experiment in which the children had to inflect verbs and pseudo-verbs. An additional
comparison was made with 6-year-old children and adults. The second research question was
whether 9-year-old poor readers perform better on the past-tense experiment in the
orthographic modality, where the stimuli were presented both auditorily and visually.
Methods:
The past tense experiment of Vreugdenhil (2010) was used to elicit the past tense of verbs and
pseudo-verbs with stem-final obstruents. The participants were either exposed to an auditory
or an orthographic version of the experiment.
Results and outcomes:
The results demonstrated that 9-year-old poor readers do not differ from normal readers on
the number of correctly inflected past tense forms for either verbs or pseudo-verbs. They were
equally good at producing the past tense overall. However, the 9-year-old normal readers
performed better when orthography was provided, whereas the poor readers did not benefit
from the orthography.