Research

Morphological awareness, or sensitivity to the meaningful parts of words as in quick+ly, has been associated with literacy skills as early as age 5 (Marks et al., 2022) but is rarely formally taught. ​​WordBuilders is a new morphological intervention for pre-readers designed to grow and develop children’s lexical skills. The aim of this project is to design, implement, and test the efficacy of direct instruction in morphological awareness in early childhood and its relation to other pre-literacy skills.

This project investigates morphological processing in child readers with and without dyslexia using a combination of neuroimaging and behavioral methods. Its goal is to inform literacy theory and research-based educational practices for struggling readers. This project was funded by NIH F32 HD110967.

Many educators and parents might expect that students with a reading disability (dyslexia) will experience greater reading impairment if they also have Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Dyslexia and ADHD are neurodevelopmental disorders with a high rate of comorbidity (an estimated 40% co-occurrence rate), but their shared risk factors and neurocognitive substrates are not well understood. In collaboration with Drs. Joanna Christodoulou, John Gabrieli, and a team at M.I.T. and MGH, this project illuminates the shared and discrete contributions of dyslexia and ADHD to reading mechanisms, both behaviorally and in the brain. Visit https://www.mrireading.org/ to learn more!