The spelling of a group of 11 partially sighted children, aged 6-10 years, was compared with that of a matched group of 22 fully sighted children, all tested during 1986-7. There was evidence that young partially sighted children were slower to make a start with spelling. No differences were found between the two groups in terms of the reproduction of silent or anomalous letters, nor in the inappropriate use of letter-sound correspondences. However, the spelling of the partially sighted children was significantly less accurate than that of the fully sighted children and this was thought to reflect their visual impairment.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
Bissex, G.L. (1980), Gnys at wrk, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Mass.) and London.
2.
Bookbinder, G.E. (1978). The Salford Sentence Reading Test, Hodder and Stoughton.
3.
Chomsky, N. (1957), Syntactic Structures, Mouton , The Hague.
4.
Corley, B.M.G. (1992), Partially sighted children: the visual processing of words and pictures, PhD. thesis, University of London .
5.
Corley, G. and Pring, L. (1993) The oral reading errors of partially sighted children , British Journal of Visual Impairment, 11, 1, 24-27.
6.
Daniels, J.C. and Diack, H. (1964), The Standard reading tests, Chatto and Windus, London.
7.
Ehri, L.C. (1978), Beginning readers from a psycholinguistic perspective: amalgamation of word identities; in F.B. Murray (Ed.), The recognition of words, International Reading Association.
8.
Ehri, L.C. and Wilce, L.S. (1985), Movement into reading: is the first stage of printed word learning visual or phonetic?, Reading Research Quarterly , 20, 163-179.
9.
Ehri, L.C. and Wilce, L.S. (1987), Does learning to spell help beginners learn to read words?, Reading Research Quarterly, 22, 47-65.
10.
Frith, U. (1985), Beneath the surface of developmental dyslexia ; in J.C. Marshall, K. Patterson andM. Coltheart (Eds.), Surface Dyslexia, Routledge and Kegan Paul , London. Ginn ( 1978), Reading 360, Ginn & Co. Ltd.
11.
Henderson, L. and Chard, J. (1980), The reader's implicit knowledge of orthographic structure; in U. Frith (Ed.), Cognitive processes in spelling, Academic Press.
12.
Lansdown, R. (1973), A study of the effect of severe visual handicap on the development of some aspects of visual perception and their relationship to reading and spelling in children in special schools for the partially sighted , Unpub. PhD. thesis, CNAA.
13.
Read, C. (1971), Preschool children's knowledge of English phonology , Harvard Educational Review, 41, 1-34.
14.
Venezky, R.L. (1970), The Structure of English Orthography, Mouton, The Hague.
15.
Weber, R.M. (1970), The study of oral reading errors: a survey of the literature, Reading Research Quarterly, 41, 96-119.
