Consonant Spelling Errors by Children with Dyslexia

Masters Degree Thesis, August 2003

The present study examines the consonant spelling errors made by children with phonological dyslexia. Sawyer, Wade, and Kim (1999) studied spelling by children with dyslexia and established that vowel and consonant substitutions are their most common errors. Two subsequent studies with children from the same population established that orthographically incorrect substitutions, such as spelling bake as backe, were far more common than neighboring phoneme substitutions, such as spelling bet as bat (Bracy, 2000; Male, 2002). Errors constituted eight percent of responses. The current study divided consonant spelling errors into three categories. Errors were evenly distributed among three categories: omissions, neighboring phoneme substitutions, and orthographically incorrect substitutions. These findings show early and persistent problems with both phonology and orthography for children with developmental dyslexia. Previous work in the field has tended to ignore the orthogaphic problems - both must be diagnosed and resolved for children to be proficient readers and spellers.

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