Inflectional Morphology: Evidence for an Advantage of Bilingualism in Dyslexia

It has been shown that morphological skills are particularly enhanced in bilingual children, whereas they are compromised in dyslexics. The aim of this work is that of investigating how bilingualism interacts with dyslexia in a task measuring the subject’s morphological abilities, to verify if the advantage typically found in bilingualism arises also in presence of a linguistic pathology such as dyslexia. We administered a task assessing the subject’s ability to generate plural noun inflections of nonwords to 106 children: 24 Italian monolingual dyslexics (mean age 10;0 y.o.), 30 Italian monolingual typically developing children (10;1), 22 bilingual dyslexic children with Italian as L2 (10;4) and 30 bilingual typically developing children with Italian as L2 (10;2). Results point to a positive effect of bilingualism, which also extends to dyslexia, with bilingual dyslexics performing consistently better than monolingual dyslexics, approaching and even surpassing, as in the most difficult conditions, the performance of monolingual unimpaired children.