Expressive Writing in Children with ADHD Symptoms

Abstract

though they are able to produce as many ideas as their matched controls. In particular, we hypothesized that children with ADHD symptoms could run into difficulties in organizing the essay, its revision, and orthography. These children were not able to concentrate on their ideas and at the same time pay attention to spelling—the result being many errors. To examine these issues we focused on the main aspects of expressive writing and spelling abilities (Tressoldi & Cornoldi, 1991). Concerning spelling, Frith’s (1985) developmental model of reading and writing identifies a series of learning stages associated to specific types of spelling error. In the first stage—the logographic—a child can only associate a particular graphic configuration to a certain concept. In the second stage—the alphabetic—a child discovers the concept of phonemes and learns to associate every phoneme to its peculiar graphic sign pattern. The typical error in this stage is phonological, resulting from incorrect association between a grapheme and the corresponding phoneme. In the third stage—the orthographic—a child learns that writing is governed by some syntactic and orthographic rules, and abandoning phonemes begins to work with syllables or other sub–lexical units. In this stage, reading and writing difficulties mainly concern ability to write frequent sub–lexical units. In the fourth stage—the hierarchical decoding—children learn specific lexical entries and are able to read and write words that do not follow the Italian phonological rules (typical writing errors in this stage are represented by illegal fusions and separations). Tressoldi and Cornoldi (1991) also described a final fifth stage, requiring a lexicon–based refinement of lexical and phonological analysis in which the main difficulties are represented by the correct use of accents and geminates.