Language delay is considered a frequent antecedent of literacy problems and both may be linked to phonological impairment. However, while several studies have examined the relationship between language delay and reading impairment, relatively few have focused on spelling. In this study, spelling performance of 28 children with developmental dyslexia (DD), 14 children with a history of language delay (LD), and 14 children without (NoLD) and 28 control participants were examined. Spelling was investigated by a writing to dictation task that included orthographically regular stimuli (word and non-words), as well as words with unpredictable transcription. Results indicated that all dyslexic participants underperformed compared to controls on both regular and unpredictable transcription stimuli, but LD performance was generally the worst. Moreover, spelling impairment assumed different characteristics in LD and NoLD children. LD children were more sensitive to acoustic-to-phonological variables, showing relevant failure especially on stimuli containing geminate consonants but also on polysyllabic stimuli and those containing non-continuant consonants. Error analysis confirmed these results, with LD children producing a higher rate of phonological errors respect to NoLD children and controls. Results were coherent with the hypothesis that among dyslexic children, those with previous language delay have more severe spelling deficit, suffering from defective orthographic lexical acquisition together with long-lasting phonological difficulties.

According to the dual-route model (DRM) of spelling, two processes operate in parallel: a lexical procedure, which relies on accessing word-specific orthographic memory, and a sublexical route, which relies on exploiting soundto-spelling regularities (e.g., phoneme-grapheme correspondences). Also according to the DRM, pseudoword spelling and consistency effects (words with consistent transcription spelled better than inconsistent ones) are considered markers of the sublexical procedure; inconsistent word spelling and the lexicality effect (words spelled better than pseudowords) together with word frequency effects (high-frequency stimuli spelled better than lowfrequency ones) are markers of the lexical procedure. The two-route view has been implemented in different spelling models (e.g., Barry, 1994;Hillis & Caramazza, 1991;Patterson, 1986;Perry, Ziegler, & Coltheart, 2002) and has received support from behavioural data derived from both adults with and those without spelling disturbances (for a review see Tainturier & Rapp, 2001) and children learning in various orthographic systems. As far as the ontogenetic acquisition of the two procedures is concerned, cross-linguistic studies have indicated that the more regular the writing system the more children rely on sublexical processing (for an English-Italian comparison see Marinelli, Romani, Burani, & Zoccolotti, 2015 AbstractWe examined how whole-word lexical information and knowledge of distributional properties of orthography interact in children's spelling. High-versus low-frequency words, which included inconsistently spelled segments occurring more or less frequently in the orthography, were used in two experiments: (a) word spelling; (b) lexical priming of pseudoword spelling. Participants were 1st-, 2nd-, and 4th-grade Italian children. Word spelling showed sensitivity to the distributional properties of orthography in all children: accuracy in spelling uncommon transcription segments emerged progressively as a function of word frequency and schooling. Lexical priming effects emerged as a function of age. When related primes contained an uncommon segment, 2nd-and 4th-graders preferred uncommon segments than common ones in spelling target pseudowords, thus inverting the response trend found in the control condition. A smaller but significant effect was present in 1st-graders, who, unlike 2nd-and 4th-graders, still preferred common segments, only slightly increasing the use of uncommon ones. A larger priming effect emerged for high-frequency primes than low-frequency ones. Results indicate that children learning to spell in a transparent orthography are sensitive to the distributional properties of the orthography. However, whole-word lexical representations are also used, with larger effects in more skilled pupils.

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