How do the spellings of children with dyslexia compare with those of nondyslexic children?

Abstract

Children with dyslexia are believed to have very poor phonological skills for which they compensate, to some extent, through relatively well-developed knowledge of letter patterns. We tested this view in Study 1 by comparing 25 dyslexic children and 25 younger normal children, chosen so that both groups performed, on average, at a second-grade spelling level. Phonological skill was assessed using phoneme counting and nonword spelling tasks. Knowledge of legal and illegal letter patterns was tested using a spelling choice task. The dyslexic children and the younger nondyslexic children performed similarly on all the tasks, and they had difficulty, for the most part, with the same linguistic structures. Supporting the idea that older dyslexics' spellings are quite similar to those of typical beginners, we found in Study 2 that experienced teachers could not differentiate between the two groups based on their spellings.

Use of morphology in spelling by children with dyslexia and typically developing children

“…The older children with dyslexia appeared somewhat less likely to maintain the entire spelling of the stem when writing an inflected word, as in the studies of Carlisle (1987) and Hauerwas and Walker (2003), but the difference was not statistically reliable in the present experiment. The many similarities that we found between the spellings of older children with dyslexia and younger typical children support the results of several previous studies in which a spelling-level match design was used (Bourassa & Treiman, 2003;Cassar, Treiman, Moats, Pollo, & Kessler, 2005;Nelson, 1980). In those studies, older children with dyslexia performed very similarly to younger typical children in use of phonological information in spelling and in knowledge of legal and illegal spelling patterns.…”

“…Confirming the preliminary findings of Bourassa and Treiman (2003), we also found that older children with dyslexia often misspell flaps. This outcome supports the idea that the same aspects of phonology that cause difficulties for typical beginning spellers also cause difficulties for older children with dyslexia (e.g., Bourassa & Treiman, 2003;Cassar et al, 2005;Moats, 1983).…”

Spelling in Adolescents With Dyslexia

“…Indeed, most research on spelling difficulties concerns children with dyslexia who are in the early stages of spelling instruction (Cassar et al, 2005;Bourassa et al, 2006) and the few data that are available seem to be contradictory.…”

“…Several other studies also failed to find a disproportionally large number of phonological errors in writers with dyslexia (Bourassa & Treiman, 2003;Nelson, 1980). Cassar et al (2005), for instance, compared the spellings of English speaking children with dyslexia (mean age 11.7 years) with those of non-dyslexic children in primary education (mean age 6.8 years), using a spelling-level matched design. The authors argued that children with dyslexia had difficulties with the same linguistic structures as typically developing (but younger) spellers.…”

“…Unfortunately, the mapping between sounds and letters is not always regular or predictable. This creates difficulties for all beginning spellers but is an additional burden for children with dyslexia whose poor phonological skills make the acquisition of inconsistent sound-to-letter mappings extra hard (Cassar et al, 2005).…”