Spelling Development of Korean 1st Graders with and without Developmental Dyslexia

Abstract

Objectives: This study examined the word writing abilities of Korean 1st graders with and without developmental dyslexia (DD) considering meaning accessibility and the structure of a Korean syllable. Methods: Fifteen typically developing children (TD) and fifteen children with developmental dyslexia were assigned word writing tasks in the first and second semesters of the first year. The word writing task contains ten words and ten non-words containing forty syllable-initial and syllable-medial graphemes, and twenty-two syllable-final graphemes. The analysis of the results was conducted in grapheme units, and the accuracy for each word/nonword and the error rate for each structure of a syllable was determined. Results: The DD group showed significant growth in both words/nonwords writing accuracy by the second semester, and the error rates of syllable-initial, syllable-medial, and syllable-final graphemes significantly decreased from the first to the second semester for the DD group. The TD group showed no significant difference in word/non-words writing, and there was no significant difference in error rates according to the structure of a syllable. Both the DD and TD groups showed higher error rates in final graphemes in both the first and second semesters. Conclusion: The word writing abilities of the DD group showed significant growth between the first and second semesters but still had difficulties, particularly in the final grapheme writing. The TD group developed word writing first, and nonword writing was still in development. But final grapheme writing was difficult even for TD group. Follow-up studies are needed to closely observe the developmental processes comparing with decoding level matched TD children.