Copying skills in children with and without dyslexia

How Do Spelling, Handwriting Speed, and Handwriting Quality Develop During Primary School? Cross-Classified Growth Curve Analysis of Children's Writing Development

“…Handwriting speed has been the center of many recent experiments in both cursive (e.g., Alamargot et al, 2020;Blampain et al, 2021) and script styles (e.g., Sumner et al, 2014), with digital tablets providing data recordings of the dynamics of handwriting (e.g., pen pressure, speed, writing duration). In contrast, there is a lack of objective and sensitive measures of legibility (Barnett et al, 2018), which presumably explains why it has been overlooked compared to speed.…”

Evidence of Altered Functional Connectivity at Rest in the Writing Network of Children with Dyslexia

“…In addition to reading impairment, DYS children have a severe and persistent impairment in spelling, which remains the most visible symptom of dyslexia in adults [ 6 , 7 ]. Past research has repeatedly demonstrated that DYS children struggle with all writing activities that are carried out every day in school, such as copying tasks [ 8 , 9 ], dictation tasks [ 10 ] and text composition [ 11 ]. Beyond school, writing difficulties can negatively impact children’s development in all aspects as poor writing abilities can have far-reaching consequences for children’s self-esteem and academic achievement [ 12 , 13 ].…”

“…On the one hand, authors have supported the idea that DYS children show poorer handwriting abilities as a direct consequence of spelling impairment. Indeed, results have demonstrated that DYS children execute handwriting at the same speed as their peers but pause more during writing tasks because of their spelling impairment [ 8 , 11 ]. Such observations led authors to conclude that DYS children are slow at completing writing tasks because of the spelling deficit, not supporting the idea that they have actual graphomotor difficulties [ 11 , 18 , 40 ].…”