Science of Aphasia 5 Cross Linguistic Aspects of Aphasia ...

Spelling impairment in Italian dyslexic children during the early phases of literacy acquisition
Paola Angelelli 1,2 , Alessandra Notarnicola 1 , Anna Judica 2 , Donatella Spinelli 2, 3 , Pierluigi Zoccolotti 2, 4 and
Claudio Luzzatti 5
1 2 3
Dipartimento di Psicologia, Università di Bari; Centro Ricerche, IRCCS Fondazione Santa Lucia, Roma;
Istituto Universitario Scienze Motorie, Roma; 4 Dipartimento di Psicologia, Università di Roma “La Sapienza”;
5
Dipartimento di Psicologia, Università di Milano-Bicocca
Background
Very few studies have documented developmental spelling disorders in languages with shallow orthography. In a
recent study on spelling deficit in Italian dyslexic children (Angelelli et al., 2004), a predominance of surface
dysgraphia was found (i.e.phonologically plausible spelling errors on words with unpredictable transcription, and
much better performance on regular words and nonwords). Moreover, the comparison of the reading and spelling
performance showed a fully coherent pattern of impairment, with most children suffering from surface dyslexia
and surface dysgraphia.
Both theoretical work and experimental data (see Tressoldi et al., 1996 for Italian) suggest a later acquisition of
the lexical route with respect to the sub-word-level one. Consequently, the phenomenology of developmental
dysgraphia might assume different features at different ages. In particular, we assume that, in the early phase of
spelling acquisition, developmental dysgraphia may be characterized by delayed acquisition and fragility of the
sub-word level routine, together with much more severe and long-lasting deficit of the orthographic lexical
acquisition.
Aim of this study is the description of the writing impairment of dyslexic children during the early phases of
literacy acquisition. To the extent that a prevalent but inefficient use of the sub-word-level routine characterizes
the initial phases of writing acquisition, we predict, in young subjects, a spelling performance reflecting
inefficient use of both the sub-lexical and lexical routes (i.e, the presence of a general impairment in all tasks
with distributed rate of phonologically plausible and phoneme-to-grapheme conversion errors). In order to test
the hypothesis of a progressive evolution to a more selective damage of the lexical route (surface dysgraphia),
we studied the writing performance in a further group of dyslexic children attending the 5 th grade and compared
their spelling performance to that of both age-matched controls and 3 rd grade dyslexic children.
Methods
Twenty-one dyslexic children were studied: 13 attending the 3 rd grade and 8 attending the 5 th grade. Writing was
investigated by means of a spelling test that included regular words with one-sound-to-one-letter
correspondence, regular words requiring syllabic conversion rules, words with unpredictable transcription. The
spelling task included nonwords in order to examine the efficiency of the sublexical route. The dyslexics’
spelling performance was compared to that of two groups of age-matched normal readers: 53 subjects attending
the 3 rd grade and 50 attending the 5 th grade.
Results
The 3 rd grade dyslexic participants performed poorly, with respect to the age-matched control sample, in all
sections of the spelling test regardless of orthographic regularity (p