These three papers on the intersection between phonology and spelling among schoolchildren suggest that this is a topic that merits our attention.In chapter 6, Diane Sawyer, Sally Wade and Jwa Kim analyze a large corpus of spelling errors among 100 schoolchildren (aged 7 to 15 years) diagnosed with dyslexia. The resulting database is important in (mostly) confirming patterns of difficulty among poor readers that can only be inferred from studies of typically developing readers currently available. Among other findings, the study confirms that phonetically confusable letters dominate the errors among both consonants and vowels, with vowels causing the greatest difficulty; this is also true among nondyslexic readers. At the same time, reversals of p, b,and d account for a sizable 7.41 percent of the errors among this dyslexic group (on this, it would be worthwhile to have comparable data on a nondyslexic sample). Although Sawyer et al. report a strong associaton between reading and spelling, as in typical students, this dyslexic sample appears to be unlike poor readerswith regard to sequence of develoment. Previous research on normal readers suggests that phonetic skill in spelling precedes phonetic skill in reading, but in this dyslexic sample there is no consistent advantage for reading or spelling. The paper not only succeeds in convincing us that spelling errors are a useful window on phonology, but will motivate others to make explicit comparisons of the spelling erorrs of children with and without dyslexia.The second spelling-and-phonology paper, by Yolanda Post and colleagues, converges nicely with he paper by Sawyer et al., asking explicitly about the relationship between reading skill and the identification and spelling of vowels. That paper is im-135 136 PHONOLOGY AND SPELLING portant in presenting identification and spelling data on second to fourth graders who span the entire range of reading skill from poor to excellent. Consistent with the results from Sawer et al., Post also finds short front vowels to be particularly problematic, and suggests that phonetic confusability conbributes greatly to the difficulty of the poorest readers.For chapter 8, C. K. Leong has collected data on a large number of experimental measures in an attempt to define the most important predictors of spelling accuracy among children in grades 4 to 6. His results suggest that rapid and automatic processing of phonological/orthographic information (deciding whether bloe or blog sounds like a real English word) accounts for 50% of the variation in spelling, with verbal memory accounting for an additional 18%. In this group word specific knowledge added some, but not much additional variation in spelling and even there it was more the ability to recognize that juice moose rhymed than that have cave did not. These results confirm prior research in demonstrating that acquiring the regularities of spelling is what is critical--not only for reading but for spelling and that discriminating the "outlaws" plays a much more modest role th...
Tests of a model of the expected relationships between language abilities and reading achievement measures from the beginning of kindergarten through third grade are discussed. At kindergarten, more global language abilities influenced early, wholistic measures of reading achievement, including letter and number naming. At Grade 1, these earlier accomplishments had a direct effect on word recognition, but a second direct effect was also apparent for word and pheneme segmentation measured in kindergarten. Comprehension at Grade 1 was influenced primarily by word recognition abilities at the same time. At Grade 2, comprehension influenced word recognition; at Grade 3, word recognition and comprehension were essentially independent. These findings are considered in the context of Frith's three-phase hypothesis of reading acquisition. A rationale for testing the potential of training in auditory segmentation to modulate the effects of developmental dyslexia is presented.
In 1993, the Tennessee General Assembly voted funds to establish a model unit of integrated services and research to address the full scope of issues associated with dyslexia. Dyslexia is characterized as significant difficulty in reading and spelling individual words. In the Tennessee Center for the Study and Treatment of Dyslexia, these problems are presumed to be the consequence of a phonological core deficit. When compared to typical readers, matched for age or reading level, dyslexic readers evidence average listening comprehension, a relative strength in reading comprehension, deficits in word recognition and spelling, and severe deficits in word analysis as well as in awareness and manipulation of phonemes. Integration of this information yields a diagnostic profile that may be applied in the differential diagnosis of dyslexia both in clinical and school settings. This paper presents an overview of the Tennessee Center for Dyslexia and the services it provides as well as its guidelines for interpreting the results of norm-referenced tests and criterion-referenced measures to diagnose dyslexia and plan appropriate intervention. Frith's (1985, 1986) developmental framework for reading acquisition is integrated with the assessment data to outline an instructional plan that addresses mastery of skills within and across the hierarchical phases-logographic, alphabetic, and orthographic-of reading development.
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