Abstract

VALE, Ana Paula  and  SOUSA, José. Types of error and writing difficulties of Portuguese dyslexic. Invest. Práticas [online]. 2017, vol.7, n.3, pp.61-83. ISSN 2182-1372.

Research on the nature of spelling difficulties of dyslexic children has shown mixed results and is scarce, specifically in European Portuguese. The present study aims at characterizing the spelling difficulties of Portuguese dyslexic children. Fifth grade children with dyslexia were compared with a group of typically progressing children of the same grade and chronological age and with a reading level-match group of younger third graders typical readers on word and pseudoword spelling tasks. Dyslexic children showed less accuracy, displaying more alphabetic and more orthographic errors, than their age-matched peers on all the psycholinguistics items categories.  When compared with the younger children, dyslexic fifth graders produced errors on the irregular and on the contextual words but obtained equivalent scores on regular words and on pseudowords. Also, they did not differ from the younger group in the amount of alphabetic type errors but produced significantly more errors indicating difficulties in the use of orthographic knowledge. In conclusion, the findings are consistent with the idea that fifth grade Portuguese children with dyslexia can learn and may achieve good alphabetic spelling levels, although in a slow manner, but still present a deficit of orthographic knowledge use, particularly one tapping lexical knowledge. This indicates a discrepant cognitive functioning of dyslexic children.

Keywords : dyslexia; spelling, error types; alphabetic knowledge; orthographic knowledge.

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