Nonword Spelling Research Articles

A dissociation between orthographic awareness and spelling production

In this study, two nonword spelling and two orthographic awareness experiments were used to examine people's production and awareness of sound–spelling relationships. The results of the nonword spelling experiments suggest that, in general, people use phoneme–grapheme sized relationships when spelling nonwords. Alternatively, the results of the orthographic awareness experiments suggest that, under some circumstances, people can use larger sized sound–spelling relationships when judging how frequently subsyllabic relationships occur. Together the results suggest that there is a dissociation between sound–spelling production and sound–spelling awareness tasks, and the size of the sound–spelling relationships that people use varies under different tasks and task conditions.

A consonant-vowel priming effect in nonword spelling

Two experiments are reported that examine whether consonant/vowel structure can be primed in nonword spelling. The results show that when two possible consonant/vowel structures can be used to spell a nonword, participants are more likely to use the consonant/vowel structure of a previous prime word than an alternative structure. Such a result suggests that some form of abstract consonant/vowel representation is used when spelling nonwords. This result supports the multiple object spelling model, which is the only model of spelling that has hypothesised that such a representation exists.

The “temporal processing deficit” hypothesis in dyslexia: New experimental evidence

The notion that developmental dyslexia may result from a general, nonspecific, defect in perceiving rapidly changing auditory signals is a current subject of debate (so-called "temporal processing deficit" hypothesis). Thirteen phonological dyslexics (age 10-13 years) and 10 controls matched for chronological and reading age were compared on a temporal order judgment (TOJ) task using the succession of two consonants (/p/-/s/) within a cluster. In order to test the relevance of the temporal deficit hypothesis, the task also included two additional conditions where either the two stimuli were artificially slowed or the interstimulus interval was expanded. As expected, the TOJ performance was significantly poorer in dyslexics than in controls. Moreover, in the "slowed speech" condition dyslexics' performance improved to reach the normal controls' level, whereas no significant improvement occurred when increasing the interstimulus interval. Finally dyslexics' performances, especially on the slowed condition, were found correlated with several tests of phonological processing (phoneme deletion, rhyme judgment, and nonword spelling tasks). These results lend support to the general temporal deficit theory of dyslexia.

Parallels between the reading and spelling deficits of two subgroups of developmental dyslexics

The spelling errors of third graders who fit phonological and surface profiles of developmental dyslexia were analyzed, along with the errors of younger (reading level matched) and chronologically age matched non-dyslexic comparison groups. In Study 1, errors were analyzed as phonologically constrained, unconstrained, or inaccurate and as either orthographically acceptable or unacceptable. Study 2 extended the error classifica- tion system to nonword spellings. The main finding was that different types of dyslexics produced different types of errors. Both studies found that children produced spelling errors consistent with their type of dyslexia. The phonological group showed poor knowledge of phoneme-grapheme correspondences, consistent with the existence of a phonological deficit. The surface group's spelling error profile differed from the phonological group and closely resembled the younger normal comparison group. This pattern is consistent with other evidence that surface dyslexia represents a general delay in acquiring literacy skills. The studies provide converging evidence, from a spelling task, that developmental dyslexia is a non-homogeneous category consisting of at least two major subtypes with distinct etiologies and behavioral sequelae.

Deficits in phoneme segmentation are not the core problem of dyslexia: Evidence from German and English children

A widely held assumption about dyslexia is that difficulties in accessing the constituent phonemes of the speech stream are responsible for specific reading and spelling difficulties. In consistent orthographies, however, the acquisition of accurate phonological recoding and phonemic awareness was found to pose much less difficulty than in English, and even dyslexic children were found to exhibit high levels of performance in phonemic segmentation (Wimmer, 1993). Nevertheless, using a rather complex phonological awareness and manipulation task (spoonerisms: MAN–HAT → HAN–MAT), Landerl, Wimmer, and Frith (1997) found support for the original position on phonological awareness deficit, as both German and English dyslexic children showed poor performance. In the present studies, the spoonerism responses of Landerl et al. were reanalyzed such that children were given credit for partially correct responses (e.g., a response of HAN for MAN–HAT). Such partially correct responses were taken to indicate full segmentation of both stimulus words at the onset–rime level. The effect of this rescoring was that the error rate dropped from 76% to 26% for the English dyslexic children and from 63% to 15% for the German dyslexic children. Even higher performance levels, although not perfect as for the age-matched control children, were found on a nonword spelling task in both groups. A second study examined the segmentation of consonant clusters in younger German dyslexic children and found performance levels of about 90% correct when memory problems were ruled out. We argue that, at least in the context of a consistent orthography (and a phonics-based teaching approach), deficits in phoneme awareness are only evident in the early stages of reading acquisition, whereas rapid naming and phonological memory deficits are more persistent in dyslexic children.

Patterns of Phonological and Memory Processing in Beginning Readers and Spellers of Greek

This study examined the patterns of reading and spelling performance of first-grade Greek children who either were facing difficulties in literacy acquisition or were normal achievers. In addition, we studied the relationship between obtained literacy development levels and the children's phonological awareness and ability to retain phonological information in short-term memory. The participants were tested in the reading of single letters, letter clusters, words, and nonwords, as well as in word and nonword spelling. Furthermore, their phonological processing knowledge was assessed via a battery of phonological awareness tasks and short-term memory phonetic-representation tasks. The main findings of the study were as follows: (a) Accurate decoding of Greek was achieved by almost every young child (attributed mainly to the nature of the Greek writing system); (b) the time the children needed to process a written item was the crucial index of their difficulty in literacy acquisition; (c) spelling was performed by deriving the orthographic form of a word on the basis of sound-spelling correspondence knowledge; (d) although the children with difficulties in literacy development had achieved a satisfactory performance in phonological processing, their performance was nevertheless significantly lower than that of the normal achievers; and (e) phonemic awareness and speech rate tasks were among the best predictors of learning to read and spell Greek words.

Phonological awareness and spelling abilities of Cantonese–English bilingual children

The phonological awareness of 36 Cantonese-English bilingual children, aged between 3 & 10 years, was compared with matched monolingual English-speaking children. A battery of phonological awareness tasks was used that assessed syllable awareness, onset-rime awareness, phoneme awareness, reading & spelling. The only task differentiating monolingual & bilingual preschool children was rhyme awareness, the monolingual children performing better than the bilingual children. A comparison of the school-age children indicated that the monolingual children performed better in terms of number of plausible spelling errors, nonword spelling, nonword reading, visual rhyme recognition, phoneme manipulation & spoonerisms. Previous research on children learning two phonologically similar languages (eg, English-French, Italian-English) has reported that bilingual children have superior phonological awareness. The conflicting findings reported are discussed in terms of the following factors: spoken phonological structure; type of orthography; & literacy teaching strategies. It was concluded that each of these factors plays a role in determining the phonological awareness skills of bilingual children. 1 Table, 1 Figure, 43 References. Adapted from the source document

Variations in Spelling Style among Lexical and Sublexical Readers

This study examined whether whole-word (orlexical) and spelling–sound rule (orsublexical) patterns of reliance could be identified in children's spelling and whether there was consistency across reading and spelling domains. A group of 128 children was assessed on their reading and spelling of regular, irregular, and nonwords. Compatible with Treiman (1984), the pairwise correlations indicated that both lexical and sublexical processes were involved in spelling. When two subgroups differing in reading reliance were selected, their respective spelling patterns were found to be consistent with their reading styles: The sublexically reliant group performed better at spelling nonwords and made more regularization errors on irregular words, while the lexically reliant subjects were more likely to make errors containing partial lexical information when spelling irregular words. The results are consistent with dual-route accounts of the skilled spelling system and also have implications for lexical acquisition processes.

Skilled Reading with Impaired Phonology: A Case Study

This paper describes the case of a young woman who is an above average reading comprehender despite deficient phonological processing and phonological memory. She has notdeveloped a reliable or readily accessible set of associations between graphemes and phonemes, and is extremely poor at nonword reading and spelling. We found that, although she was well below average in reading aloud and spelling words, what she excelled at was orthographic processing in silentreading tasks. She was above averagein efficiency in choosing thecorrectly spelt word of short word nonword pairs and in deciding on the lexical status of long words and nonwords, and her efficiency in performing lexical decisions on short word and nonword sequences was exceptional. These data suggest that impaired phonological processing capacity can be compensated for by the development of superior orthographic processing ability.

The early manifestation of developmental dyslexia: Evidence from German children

The present study retrospectively examined early difficulties with phonological coding and phonemic segmentation of German children who after four years in school were diagnosed as dyslexic. German, in comparison to English, exhibits rather simple and straight-forward grapheme-phoneme correspondences, and the initial teaching approach was phonics oriented. Despite these favorable circumstances for the acquisition of phonological coding, the majority of the later dyslexic children had particular difficulties with the accurate reading of nonwords and of unfamiliar words after about seven months of reading instruction. However, there were enormous differences between the dyslexic children. Two of them were completely unable to ‘blend’ phonemes into pronunciations, another seven were slow and error prone decoders, and three children had slow and laborious pronunciation assembly as the core problem. The majority of the later dyslexic children also exhibited phonemic segmentation deficits as tested with a nonword spelling task and a phoneme reversal task. In correspondence with findings from older German dyslexic children, the early difficulties with accurate phonological coding and phonemic segmentation were no longer found at the end of grade four. Children then suffered from very slow reading and poor spelling. In general, the difficulties of German dyslexic children emphasize the phonological impairment account of dyslexia. More specifically, these findings suggest that the assembly of letter sounds into pronunciations is particularly affected in the early phase of learning to read a consistent orthography.

Lexical and Nonlexical Spelling Deficits in Dementia of the Alzheimer Type

Written spelling was assessed in 16 subjects with dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT) using an information processing approach. The results were compared to the performance in a group of healthy elderly subjects. The Alzheimer subjects scored significantly lower in word spelling and nonword spelling ability than the controls (F(1, 7) = 187,p< .0001), and both the lexical and the nonlexical spelling strategies were affected. The results did not support the hypothesis that nonlexical ability is preserved in DAT. In the DAT group, spelling correlated significantly (p< 0.01) with the severity of dementia, but spelling performance was not associated with the age of onset of dementia or family history of dementia.

Spelling in Adults: Orthographic Transparency, Learning New Letter Strings and Reading Accuracy

Five experiments examined differences in spelling production, spelling acquisition and reading accuracy in adults. Experiment 1A confirmed the effects of spelling ability and orthographic transparency on spelling production reported by Fischer, Shankweiler and Liberman (1985), and provided qualified support for the differential superiority of good spellers on morphophonemic knowledge versus orthographic conventions. Experiment 1B extended the effects of orthographic transparency and spelling ability to familiar words. Good spellers were superior in recognition and recall of nonword spellings in Experiment 2, most markedly on long, pronounceable items. Good spellers also had higher recognition accuracy for confusable but not discriminable words that they had read in sentences, and displayed greater knowledge of confusable word meanings (Experiments 3A and 3B). They were no more accurate than poor spellers on memory for names they had read, indicating that their reading accuracy varies with the demands of comprehension (Experiment 3B). The results are consistent with a view that good spellers achieve more accurate learning of words' orthographies and better vocabulary knowledge in their reading than do poor spellers.

A PET study of the functional neuroanatomy of writing impairment in Alzheimer's disease. The role of the left supramarginal and left angular gyri.

A dissociation in the central processes of spelling, with preferentially lexical over phonological impairment, frequently affects patients with early Alzheimer's disease. The aim of this work was to test whether dissociations in the language domain in Alzheimer's disease can be exploited with PET to assess the neural basis of cognition. To this end, we studied the functional neuroanatomy of writing impairment in Alzheimer's disease by means of PET measurements of the local cerebral glucose utilization and neuropsychological tests specially designed to assess the phonological and lexical components of writing. We analysed the performance in written spelling of irregular words and non-words of 11 right-handed patients with mild-to-moderate Alzheimer's disease. For each patient, we calculated a residual phonological score and a residual lexical score, based on a cognitive interpretation of the errors according to the item category. In each of these 11 patients, using PET, we measured the resting-state utilization of glucose in the left supramarginal gyrus and the left angular gyrus, two cortical regions selected a priori because of their presumed role in the central processes for spelling, and identified on CT scans obtained according to stereotaxic references and coregistered with PET. To assess the relationships between the neuropsychological scores and the metabolic data, we used the 'ratio paradigm', the sensitivity of which has been previously documented in cognitive-metabolic correlative PET studies of Alzheimer's disease that were less focused than the present study in both cognitive and anatomical terms. We found a highly significant positive correlation between phonological score:lexical score neuropsychological ratios and corresponding supramarginal gyrus:angular gyrus metabolic ratios. These findings further support the role of these two left-sided temporo-parietal regions in the central processes of writing and show that the neuropsychological dissociations in early Alzheimer's diseases can be exploited to further our understanding of the functional neuroanatomy of cognitive operations. The role of focal, as compared with more diffuse, brain damage in the development of impaired written language of central origin in Alzheimer's disease is also discussed.

Casting a spell with witches and broomsticks: Direct and associative influences on nonword orthography

Abstract This study investigated direct and associative lexical priming of nonword spelling in adults and children. Two possible alternative orthographies of each nonword were targeted under both direct and associative priming conditions. It was found that both direct and associative priming manipulations were effective in influencing the choice of spelling pattern of nonwords, with both children and adults showing the effect. Levels of priming in children were lower, though not significantly lower, than those in adults. Direct priming was significantly stronger than associative priming for both subject groups, with the size of this differential being reduced in children. The differences between the types of priming are seen as speaking to a multiple-activation model of the orthographic lexicon, whereas those between age groups as pointing to a differential functional organisation of the lexicon.

Component Spelling Skills of College Students with Childhood Diagnoses of Dyslexia

This article examines the component spelling skills of adults with childhood diagnoses of dyslexia in an effort to identify some of the basic impairments associated with their spelling problems and to determine if these adults ever attain age- or level-appropriate competence. College students with childhood diagnoses of dyslexia were given a dictation task, a spelling-recognition task, and a nonword spelling task to assess their use and knowledge of sound-spelling, orthographic, morphologic, and visual information. Their performance on these tasks was compared to that of control groups of normal college students and of normal grade 6 (matched with the dyslexics on the basis of their standardized spelling and reading test scores). Dyslexics' spelling problems were primarily associated with their failure to acquire knowledge of the mappings between spelling and sounds of English. Their use and knowledge of morphological (higher level linguistic) information and of visual information for spelling, however, is predictable from their reading and spelling levels. This last set of results reflects the fact that the dyslexics in this study engaged in much reading and that exposure to written words plays an important role in the development of these specific component spelling skills.

Development of young children's phonological and orthographic knowledge as revealed by their spellings.

We investigated the development of young children's phonological and orthographic knowledge by obtaining nonword spellings from a total of 187 children―45 each from kindergarten, first, and second grade, and 52 from third grade. Our results indicated that young children's nonword spellings reflect the joint influences of linguistic knowledge (orthographic and phonological) and psychological processes (working memory limitations) and that these influences vary developmentally. Limited working memory constrains the spelling performance of younger children but not that older children. For youngeer children, individual differences in phonological awareness and in working memory account for nearly all of the shared variance between spelling and word decoding ; for older children, additional factors are also implicated

Associative priming and orthographic choice in nonword spelling

Abstract An experiment is reported in which adult English-speaking subjects wrote nonwords to dictation in a free (unprimed) condition and in a primed condition in which the nonword was preceded by a word that was an associate of a word that rhymed with the nonword target (e.g. vatican—(pope)→ bope vs detergent—(soap)→boap). Choice of orthographic patterns in nonword spelling was additively influenced by the associative priming and by sound-spelling contingency (the proportion of words in the lexicon containing the critical pattern). However, an analysis of unprimed spellings suggested that contingency was no more than a partial determinant of orthographic choice. Some implications for models of spelling storage and retrieval are discussed.

Accurate non-word spelling despite congenital inability to speak: phoneme-grapheme conversion does not require subvocal articulation.

Previous work has shown that children with motor speech disorders (dysarthria) have no particular difficulty in spelling non-words containing sounds that they cannot produce accurately in their own speech. This suggests that subvocal articulation is not implicated in generating a graphemic representation from a phonological string. However, it could be argued that, although severely unintelligible, dysarthric individuals may be able to use their own articulation as a basis for translating between phonemes and graphemes. In this study we investigated spelling of words and non-words in cerebral palsied individuals, including speechless (anarthric) as well as dysarthric subjects. Although spelling abilities of these individuals were below control levels, there was no evidence that different processes were used, and one anarthric individual achieved perfect performance in spelling a list of non-words which included consonant clusters. It is concluded that spelling by the 'indirect' route can be achieved in the absence of any articulation.

A comparison of priming effects on the nonword spelling performance of good and poor spellers

Abstract This study examines the effects of lexical biasing on the nonword spelling performance of good and poor adult spellers of normal reading ability in an experimental (priming) phase and in a control (free-spelling) phase. Although the extent of lexical biasing demonstrated by these subjects was much less than that reported by Campbell (1983), significant lexical priming effects were noted for both groups. Poor spellers, however, showed greater susceptibility to the influence of an experimenter-provided lexical exemplar. Contrary to Campbell's findings, a negative correlation was obtained between spelling accuracy and extent of biasing. Sound-to-spelling contingency (i.e. the frequency with which spelling patterns represent vowel phonemes in words) also proved to be a significant factor underlying the performance of both groups. Results are discussed within a multiple-levels model of spelling in which performance is viewed as the outcome of an interaction between a primary routine, which rapidly gen...

Lexical agraphia from focal lesion of the left precentral gyrus

Lexical agraphia reflects a dysfunction of the lexical spelling system and is characterized by better spelling of nonwords and regular words than irregular words. All previously reported cases with documented focal lesions had involvement of temporo-parieto-occipital regions. We now report a case of lexical agraphia following a discrete lesion of the left precentral gyrus. Our case complements previous neuroanatomical accounts of agraphia and provides further support for the independence of neuronal systems that mediate spelling from those involved in spoken language and reading.