Abstract
Children with dyslexia face persistent difficulties in acquiring not only reading skills but also spelling skills. Among difficulties in spelling, problems in grammatical spelling have been studied very rarely. The goal of the study is to better understand grammatical spelling difficulties in children with dyslexia by assessing written syntactic awareness skills, a linguistic factor that has not been investigated in the context of spelling until now. It is worth noting that while morphological awareness has been well studied in children with dyslexia, only very few studies have focused on syntactic awareness, which is, however, necessary to produce number or gender agreement. Twenty children with dyslexia were matched to typically developing children on both chronological age and on grammatical spelling level. All the children were asked to perform a subject verb agreement grammatical spelling test and a written syntactic awareness test on the same sentences, as well as control measures. Results demonstrated that the children with dyslexia performed equally compared to grammatical spelling matched children in grammatical spelling, whilst they performed less well compared to children of the same age. For syntactic awareness, they were less accurate at identifying the subject of the complex sentences than spelling age matched children, even though both groups were matched in grammatical spelling. These results demonstrate that children with dyslexia face a specific deficit in written syntactic awareness. It highlights how better understanding of the spelling difficulty will better guide treatment.
Highlights
Children with dyslexia who represent between 10 and 15% of school age children (Vellutino et al, 2004) are known to have reading and spelling deficits (Maughan et al, 2009)
The question was to know: (1) whether children with dyslexia had a specific difficulty in syntactic awareness or not and if so, (2) to what extent that syntactic awareness contributed to variance in grammatical spelling in DYS children compared to in control children
The results showed that children with dyslexia have a poorer level of grammatical spelling compared to CA children, which is in accordance with previous studies that present converging results in this direction (Hauerwas and Walker, 2003; Egan and Pring, 2004; Diamanti et al, 2014)
Summary
Children with dyslexia who represent between 10 and 15% of school age children (Vellutino et al, 2004) are known to have reading and spelling deficits (Maughan et al, 2009). Even for students with dyslexia who have access to higher education, inflectional spelling errors are still observed in text productions and in dictation tasks (Tops et al, 2013). For these reasons, it is important to understand more fully the persistent. Grammatical Spelling and Syntactic Awareness in Dyslexia difficulties encountered by children with dyslexia. In the few studies up to now, some authors have investigated the relationship between grammatical spelling and difficulties in morphological awareness. To the best of our knowledge, not one has tried to evaluate a closely related but different skill, written syntactic awareness, which is involved in the underlying processes of grammatical spelling
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
