J Psycholinguist Res (2006) 35:471–490 DOI 10.1007/s10936-006-9025-8 ORIGINAL PAPER Morphological Processing in Adult Dyslexia Mark Leikin · Even Zur Hagit Published online: 3 November 2006 © Springer+Business Media, LLC 2006 Abstract This study employed the masked-priming paradigm [Forster and Davis (J Exp Psychol bearn Mem Cogn 10: 680–698, 1984).], along with traditional methods of evaluation of morphological awareness and phonological processing, to obtain a finer-grained picture of the relationship between morphological abilities and reading in adult dyslexic readers. Participants were 21 dyslexic and 21 normally reading native Hebrew-speaking male college students. The results with masked priming demon- strated almost normal status of morphological knowledge in adult dyslexic readers with the presence of characteristic processing slowness. Phonological processing and morphological awareness were also shown to contribute primarily to word decoding in the regular and dyslexic group alike. At the same time, the contribution of different phonological skills to morphological priming effects (for pattern and root) dropped to zero. The findings demonstrated that weakness of dyslexic readers in morphological awareness tasks cannot be explained either by hypotheses on the structural deficit of morphological knowledge in dyslexia or by phonological deficit hypotheses. The explanation for this phenomenon seems to lie in the specific deficit of morphological processing, or even, more generally, in metalinguistic processing deficiency in dyslexia. Keywords Morphological priming · Morphology · Decoding · Dyslexia · Hebrew Introduction It is widely accepted now that phonological abilities play an important and even criti- cal role in reading acquisition, and that reading disabilities are significantly related to poor word recognition skills (Adams, 1990, Bentin & Leshem, 1993, Bradley, 1989, Goswami & Bryant, 1990, Stanovich, 2000, Wagner & Torgesen, 1987). Yet apart M. Leikin (B ) · E. Z. Hagit Faculty of Education, University of Haifa, Mount Carmel, Haifa 31905, Israel e-mail: markl@construct.haifa.ac.il