The Impact of Orthography on Text Production in Three Languages: Catalan, English, and Spanish

Abstract

Learning to write effectively is key for learning and participation in social communities. In English, transcription skills (handwriting and spelling) constrain written production at the early stages of learning to write. The effect of transcription diminishes with age, when reading skills enhance text production. Less is known about how transcription and reading interact with writing in other languages. In this study, we explore the relationships between spelling, reading and the length and quality of written text produced by primary school children speaking three different languages: Catalan, English, and Spanish. These languages are good test cases for models of writing development as they contrast orthographically and morphologically. Participants produced a written narrative text and completed standardized assessments of handwriting, spelling, reading decoding, and reading comprehension. Language had a significant effect on text production measures: young Spanish children produced longer texts which were of higher quality than the other two cohorts. They also produced the lowest number of spelling errors both at the root and for affixed morphemes. By contrast, the English children produced the highest number of both types of errors. The Catalan children did not differ significantly from their English peers for root level spelling but produced significantly fewer spelling errors at the affixed morpheme level. To test how transcription and reading skills impact on text production skills, we conducted regression analysis for each language. Different patterns of relationships between transcription, reading and text production emerged. In Catalan only handwriting fluency accounted for significant variance in text productivity and quality. By contrast, for the English children significant variance in productivity was accounted for by reading and handwriting fluency and for text quality by handwriting fluency and spelling. For the Spanish children reading skills were the significant factor for text quality. No other models were significant. Implications for developmental models of writing development are discussed.

The Spelling Errors of French and English Children With Developmental Language Disorder at the End of Primary School

“…This was rather an incidental finding as the focus of the present study was really on spelling errors. Future studies may want to further investigate the nature of the differences observed in the present study, including predictors of different components of text spelling such as morphological awareness (e.g., in Desrochers et al, 2018) but also reading and transcription skills involved at different stages of the development of text production (Llaurado and Dockrell, 2020). We also suggest that reading might be a better indicator of phonological skills in late primary school than an explicit measure of phonological awareness.…”

The Contribution of Word-, Sentence-, and Discourse-Level Abilities on Writing Performance: A 3-Year Longitudinal Study

“…The full administration procedure lasted for 50 min. This is the typical duration of writing tasks in the participating schools, also used in prior studies (e.g., Llaurado and Dockrell, 2020 ). The exact same procedure was followed for both cohorts and testing moments.…”

“…In the word level, spelling could be defined as the ability to retrieve, assemble, and select orthographic symbols (Abbott and Berninger, 1993 ). Large-span cross-sectional studies found that spelling errors (an indicator of spelling skill) decreased throughout schooling, for example, from Grades 2 to 5 (Alves and Limpo, 2015 ), Grades 2 to 6 (Llaurado and Dockrell, 2020 ; Magalhães et al, 2020 ), and Grades 1 to 9 (Bahr et al, 2012 ). However, a few studies examined the type of errors produced, which can inform about the spelling difficulties of students in each language.…”

Methodological Issues in Literacy Research Across Languages: Evidence From Alphabetic Orthographies

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