Predictors of single word spelling in English speaking children: a cross sectional study

Abstract

Background: The study aimed to explore to what extent variables associated with lexical and sublexical spelling processes predicted single word spelling ability and whether patterns of lexical and sublexical processes were different across ages. Methods: Beginning (mean age 7 years, N = 144) and advanced (mean age 9 years, N = 114) English-speaking spellers completed tasks associated with sublexical processing (phonological ability and phonological short-term memory), lexical processing (visual short-term memory and visual attention span) and factors known to predict spelling (e.g., rapid automatised naming). Results: Phonological ability, rapid automatised naming, visual short-term memory and visual attention span were significant predictors of spelling accuracy for beginning spellers, while for more advanced spellers, only visual attention span was a significant predictor. Conclusions: The findings suggested that for beginning spellers, both lexical and sublexical processes are important for single word spelling, but with increasing This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

The visual‐attention span deficit in developmental dyslexia: Review of evidence for a visual‐attention‐based deficit

“…No reliable pattern emerged from the investigation of typical readers. While some studies reported no or weak VAS-PA relationships (Bosse & Valdois, 2009;Marinelli, Zoccolotti, & Romani, 2020;Niolaki et al, 2021), others found the two skills to be more highly correlated (from .41 to .45) (Valdois, Lassus-Sangosse, et al, 2019;Valdois, Roulin, & Bosse, 2019; Van den Boer & de Jong, 2018;Van den Boer, van Bergen, & de Jong, 2014). Variations in the tasks that were used to measure PA or in the language and age of participants (and whether the effect of age and IQ was controlled for, or not) may well account for these inconsistencies.…”

Ontogenesis Model of the L2 Lexical Representation

“…In the dimension of mappings, the optimum range is reached when the linguistic domains of lexical representations are well interconnected or when orthographic, phonological, and semantic elements “have been amalgamated” (Niolaki et al, 2020, p.591). The links between the individual domains of a representation are established and sufficiently strong so that the whole information about the lexical entry can be easily retrieved at an encounter with any domain.…”

Probabilistic modeling of orthographic learning based on visuo-attentional dynamics

“…This seems to be the case. Indeed, there is growing evidence that visual attention is a concurrent and longitudinal predictor of word reading fluency (Bosse & Valdois, 2009;Chan & Yeung, 2020;Valdois et al, 2019;van den Boer & de Jong, 2018) and word spelling acquisition (Niolaki et al, 2020;Valdois et al, submitted;van den Boer et al, 2015) and that individuals with reduced visual attention capacity are slow readers and poor spellers (Bosse et al, 2007;Chen et al, 2019;Valdois et al, 2011;Valdois et al, 2021;Zoubrinetzky et al, 2014). Evidence that BRAID-Learn can account for the evolution of eye movement patterns when repeatedly confronted to the same input strings is further evidence in support of its theoretical assumptions.…”

“…Further evidence that VA span more specifically relates to reading subskills that reflect word-specific orthographic knowledge -like irregular word reading (Bosse & Valdois, 2009), reading speed (Lobier et al, 2013;van den Boer et al, 2015;van den Boer & de Jong, 2018) or the length effect in word reading (van den Boer et al, 2013) -supports a potential contribution of VA span to word-specific orthographic knowledge acquisition. More direct evidence comes from studies showing a link between VA span and spelling acquisition (Niolaki et al, 2020;van den Boer et al, 2015) and from studies showing that VA span modulates novel word orthographic learning (Bosse et al, 2015;Chaves et al, 2012;Ginestet et al, 2020;Marinelli et al, 2020). Without minimizing the role of phonological skills in orthographic acquisition, these findings suggest that visual factors independently contribute to the development of word-specific orthographic knowledge.…”