Spelling improvement through letter-sound and whole-word training in two multilingual Greek- and English- speaking children

Abstract

Case studies of two children with spelling difficulty are reported. LK was multilingual and ED bilingual. A training programme that targeted phonic decoding (or sublexical) spelling processes was conducted with both children. Immediate and delayed post-training assessments showed improvement in spelling nonwords for LK but not for ED. Training that targeted whole word (or lexical) spelling processes was then conducted with ED. Improvement in spelling of irregular words (a marker for lexical spelling processes) was observed. Research into literacy difficulties with multilingual children is sparse, although multilingualism is increasingly widespread. Up to now theoretically based training studies have focused on monolingual children and results were promising. The present findings indicate that theoretically based training programmes for literacy difficulties can also be effective for multilingual children.

Using verbal fluency tasks to investigate the lexicon in Greek-speaking children with literacy and language disorders

“…The finding that phonologically correct spelling is not challenging for Greek children with DDLD is consistent with other studies in the Greek orthography which found that the majority of spelling errors were phonologically correct in children with dyslexia (Niolaki & Masterson, 2013;Porpodas, 1999;. This finding is not consistent with other studies in the Greek orthography, however, which revealed that children with dyslexia produced a substantial amount of phonological errors (Diamanti, 2006;Niolaki, Masterson, & Terzopoulos, 2014). Niolaki et al (2014) in their case study, also reported a rate around 88% of phonologically appropriate errors in Greek children with very poor nonword reading and spelling.…”

A linguistic awareness intervention targeting spelling and written expression in a 10-year-old dyslexic child

“…Exception word reading is considered to be a measure of lexical processes and pseudoword reading a measure of sublexical processes (Bosse, 2015;Hagiliassis, Pratt, & Johnston, 2006). Identifying whether the child relies on lexical or sublexical processes can help the specialist dyslexia teacher tailor an appropriate intervention according to the child's profile (a lexical, sublexical or mixed profile, see single case studies by Niolaki, Terzopoulos & Masterson, 2014;Niolaki, et al, 2017;Broom & Doctor, 1995,a,b;Brunsdon, Hannan, Coltheart, & Nickels, 2002;Kohnen, Nickels, Brunsdon, & Coltheart, 2008;Rowse & Wilshire, 2007).…”

“…For reading, spelling and written expression, the past 50 years of research has indicated that a number of cognitive processes including phonological ability, phonological memory, rapid automatised naming (RAN), visual memory and visual attention span (VAS) differentiate good from poor achievers (see, Niolaki et al, 2014Niolaki et al, , 2017Berninger et al, 2002;Bosse, Tainturier, & Valdois, 2007;Castles & Coltheart, 1993;Ehri, Nunes, Stahl, & Willows, 2001;Georgiou, Torppa, Manolitsis, Lyytinen, & Parrila, 2012;Giles & Terrell, 1997;Goulandris & Snowling, 1991;Landerl et al, 2013;Savage & Frederickson, 2005;Snowling, 2000;Stainthorp, Powell, & Stuart, 2013;Valdois et al, 2003;Wolf & Bowers, 1999). We utilised assessments of these processes to explore whether, for AM, we might identify, for example, a selective phonological deficit, as suggested by the core phonological deficit hypothesis of dyslexia (Hulme & Snowling, 2009;Snowling, 2000), or a lexical deficit, found to be associated in the past with deficient Visual Attention Span (VAS), the visual attention span hypothesis (Bosse et al, 2007;Valdois et al, 2003), or impaired visual memory (Goulandris & Snowling, 1991).…”

Semantic Priming in Monolingual Russian and Bilingual Russian (L1)-English (L2) Speakers in a Single Word Naming Task

“…Diversity of languages provides a platform from which their properties and characteristics of specific features can be examined in bilingual research. This has led to a large body of research in different language pairs (e.g., Italian (L1) -English (L2), (Tabossi and Laghi, 1992); Russian (L1) -English (L2), (Abu-Rabia, 2001); Spanish (L1) -English (L2), (Rosselli, Ardila, Santisi, Arecco, Salvatierra, & Conde, 2002); Greek (L1) -French (L2), (Voga & Grainger, 2007); Greek (L1) -English (L2), (Niolaki, Masterson, & Terzopoulos, 2014).…”