Writing in Dyslexia: Product and Process

Abstract

Research on dyslexia has largely centred on reading. The aim of this study was to assess the writing of 13 children with and 28 without dyslexia at age 11 years. A programme for keystroke logging was used to allow recording of typing activity as the children performed a sentence dictation task. Five sentences were read aloud twice each. The task was to type the sentence as correctly as possible, with no time constraints. The data were analysed from a product (spelling, grammar and semantics) and process (transcription fluency and revisions) perspective, using repeated measures ANOVA and t-tests to investigate group differences. Furthermore, the data were correlated with measures of rapid automatic naming and working memory. Results showed that the group with dyslexia revised their texts as much as the typical group, but they used more time, and the result was poorer. Moreover, rapid automatic naming correlated with transcription fluency, and working memory correlated with the number of semantic errors. This shows that dyslexia is generally not an issue of effort and that cognitive skills that are known to be important for reading also affect writing.

Neurocognitive Development and Predictors of L1 and L2 Literacy Skills in Dyslexia: A Longitudinal Study of Children 5–11 Years Old

“…The writing score was based on single word and sentence dictation, and the scoring included both a product (spelling and semantic errors) and a process score (transcription fluency and revisions) (Morken & Helland, 2013). The writing of free narratives was not assessed here.…”

“…The average score of time used for each word was registered as time score, seconds per word. Importantly, only words that were actually typed went into this analysis, not the number of words in the original dictated sentences (Morken & Helland, 2013). …”

“…The remaining 29 (M = 17; F = 12) were identified with typical literacy skills, with no difference in literacy scores between the at-risk children who did not develop dyslexia and the original control group. The attained L1 and L2 literacy scores were used as baseline in the present study (see also Helland, Plante, et al, 2011;Morken & Helland, 2013).…”

Auditive training effects from a dichotic listening app in children with dyslexia

“…Other studies have found that children's early RAN skills and literacy skills appear to have a reciprocal effect (Peterson et al, ; Wolff, ). As to more demanding writing tasks, significant correlation between digit span scores and semantic errors in sentence dictations have been reported (Morken & Helland, ).…”

Studies on spelling in the context of dyslexia: a literature review

“…Research has tested non-dyslexic and dyslexic children while they performed orthographic tasks [37][38][39][40] . It was suggested that evaluation activities on dyslexic children be as diversified as possible as children usually refuse to perform formal reading and writing tasks, which is justifiable due to their own learning disabilities 40 .…”