Spelling difficulties in Spanish-speaking children with dyslexia / Dificultades de escritura en niños españoles con dislexia

Abstract

In addition to reading difficulties, a significant proportion of developmental dyslexics have spelling problems, which persist into adulthood. Studies carried out in languages with opaque orthographies have found that dyslexics frequently make phonological substitutions when spelling and have difficulties in developing orthographic representations of irregular words. Those errors seem to derive from an excessive use of phonological codes when writing. Minimal research in Spanish (relatively transparent orthography) about the relationship between dyslexia and spelling difficulties has been carried out to date. In this study, 19 Spanish-speaking developmental dyslexics (from 7 to 11 years old) and 28 controls (from 6 to 11 years old, distributed in two groups, one matched for age and the other for reading level with the dyslexics) performed a dictation task of 80 stimuli with different levels of orthographic consistency, in order to discover the codes they use in the writing process. Results showed that Spanish children with dyslexia made significantly more spelling errors, especially among the ruled and irregular words. These findings are consistent with the idea that these children have difficulties in developing orthographic representations and use phonological codes more frequently than non-dyslexics, resulting in phonologically plausible errors when writing irregular words. These results have important implications for the treatment of spelling difficulties in children with dyslexia, highlighting the need to focus on the correct acquisition of grapheme-phoneme conversion rules as well as the development of appropriate orthographic representations.