We examined testing's ability to enhance adult spelling acquisition, relative to copying and reading. Across 3 experiments in which testing with feedback was compared with copying, the spelling improvement after testing matched that following the same amount of time spent copying. A potent testing advantage, however, was observed for spelling words free-recalled. In the fourth experiment, a lar...

This article reviews the literature on normal and impaired spelling development in English. Once children begin to learn that the function of alphabetic writing is to represent the sounds of language, they go through the process of learning sound-spelling correspondences in increasingly fine detail. Continued experience with print allows children to learn about orthographic and morphological co...

In this paper we describe a connectionist model of the development of alphabetic spelling, and show that its performance resembles that of dyslexic spellers if its computational resources are restricted during learning. We then describe the results of an experiment which tests the predictions of the model on normal and dyslexic spellers. Our results suggest that dyslexic children show a similar...

Although English lacks one-to-one relationships between sounds and spellings, considering the context in which a phoneme occurs can often aid in selecting a spelling. For example, /ɑ/ is typically spelled as a when it follows /w/, as in wand, but as o when it follows other consonants, as in pond. In two experiments, we asked whether children’s spellings of vowels in nonwords were affected by th...

Although English lacks 1-to-1 relationships between sounds and spellings, considering the context in which a phoneme occurs can often aid in selecting a spelling. For example, /ɑ/ is typically spelled as a when it follows /w/, as in wand, but as o when it follows other consonants, as in pond. In 2 experiments, the authors asked whether children’s spellings of vowels in nonwords were affected by...

Orthographic spelling is a major difficulty in German-speaking children with dyslexia. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the effectiveness of an orthographic spelling training in spelling-disabled students (grade 5 and 6). In study 1, ten children (treatment group) received 15 individually administered weekly intervention sessions (60 min each). A control group (n = 4) did not receiv...

BACKGROUND An estimated 40 to 44 million adults living in the United States have severe difficulty reading, writing, spelling, and doing arithmetic. These deficiencies interfere with their receiving adequate health care. Many of these adults have reading or other learning disabilities that further compromise their ability to understand their medical conditions and to participate fully in their ...

This study compared the neuropsychological profiles of 46 children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and 16 children with SLI and Hyperlexia (SLI + H). The results indicated that the essential feature of Hyperlexia is Specific Language Impairment and not reading disability. Thus, Hyperlexia would be best conceptualized as a subgroup of Developmental Language Disorder rather than as a subg...

Typical oral and written language learners (controls) (5 girls, 4 boys) completed fMRI reading judgment tasks (sub-word grapheme-phoneme, word spelling, sentences with and without spelling foils, affixed words, sentences with and without affix foils, and multi-sentence). Analyses identified connectivity within and across adjacent levels (units) of language in reading: from subword to word to sy...