Studies on spelling in the context of dyslexia: a literature review

Abstract

This paper aimed at reviewing the literature related to national and international research on spelling difficulties by dyslexics and identifying the intervention approaches performed with regard to this topic. An integrative review of the literature was carried out in order to answer the question: considering the domain of the orthography, one of the challenges frequently faced by dyslexics, how are studies on the relationship between dyslexia and spelling characterized? The research was carried out in PubMed platform, Scopus database and Portal de Periódicos CAPES/MEC. To search the articles, the following descriptors were used: "dislexia" or "dyslexia" with the free terms "ortografia" or "spelling". One aspect should be highlighted: some works indicate that difficulties in the spelling performance by dyslexics are not exclusively due to phonological processing failures -they are also secondary to alterations in orthographic processing. A challenge faced by dyslexics is to retain phonological information to use in writing new orthographic forms. Researchers suggest that intervention strategies include phonological, orthographic and lexical activities. It is observed that few studies have analyzed the difficulties that dyslexics face when dealing with new words, as well as writing, correctly, frequently used words in their own language.

Confronting Lexical Choice and Error Distribution in Written French: New Insights into the Linguistic Insecurity of Students with Dyslexia

“…This is a surprising result as they are rather frequent and short words. Overall, Hypotheses 2- is confirmed: we observe a very significantly higher number of errors in the texts produced by students with dyslexia than in the texts produced by controls, which is in line with previous studies [ 1 , 43 , 45 , 47 , 51 , 56 , 57 ]. With a few exceptions, this occurs in all categories of words: frequent or infrequent, short or long, invariant grammatical words, or highly inflected words (verbs, nouns, adjectives).…”

“…As mentioned in the literature review, students with dyslexia have difficulties with written text production, whether it be with syntax, text organization, revision, and of course spelling [ 1 , 2 , 4 , 26 , 43 , 44 , 45 , 46 , 47 , 48 , 49 , 50 , 51 , 52 , 53 ]. The initial objective of this current study was to complete the existing work on spelling and better identify the spelling difficulties to improve the remediation and to support students with dyslexia more efficiently.…”

“…Recent literature confirms our results: students with dyslexia can have some difficulties with short and frequent words [ 82 ] and the ten most words containing an error are short and frequent (très, peut, à, après, ils, ont, c’est, ce, au, est). Cidrim & Madeiro (2017) [ 45 ] confirm that there is a lack of studies on short and frequent words. To conclude, it is more the spelling process of the invariant words which is concerned and is a problem for students with dyslexia.…”

“…Secondly, another possible explanation for this might be that spelling difficulties could be linked to a lexical and spelling deficit. Indeed, some recent studies mention that spelling difficulties of students with dyslexia are not exclusively due to phonological process but also to a deficit that affects lexical and orthographic processing [ 43 , 45 ], which can explain their specific spelling difficulties with short words.…”

“…Studies show that adults with dyslexia continue to experience difficulties with writing [ 2 , 4 , 5 , 27 , 28 , 43 , 44 , 45 , 46 , 47 , 48 , 49 , 50 , 51 , 52 ] in spite of remediation programs that reduce the difficulties but do not eliminate the anomalies [ 52 ]. Many students with dyslexia have problems with composition organization, handwriting, punctuation, and redrafting [ 53 ].…”