$ $ & This article considers the differences between good and poor spellers. The article is organized into four basic sections that consider the factors involved in learning to spell and the relationship between reading and spelling, spelling ability in good and poor readers, the good reader–poor speller paradox, and individual differences in good and poor spellers. The major conclusion reached...

The authors used microgenetic methods in 2 experiments to examine children's and adults' progress from initial attempts at spelling nonwords to later direct memory retrieval of the spellings. Participants repeatedly spelled nonwords presented in computerized, dictated-word spelling tests over several weeks. Following each spelling, participants provided retrospective strategy reports. Half of t...

Using assistive reading software may be a cost-effective way to increase the opportunity for independent learning in students with learning disabilities. However, the effectiveness and perception of assistive reading software has seldom been explored in English-as-a-second language students with learning disabilities. This research was designed to explore the perception and effect of using assi...

The SelfSpell programs provide a multimedia environment for dyslexic children which uses synthesised speech to augment the written text. In earlier research we established that by encouraging users to enter a rule to help them remember how to spell each word, Selfspell was very effective in improving spelling ability. The evaluation study reported here confirmed the efficacy of the rule-based a...

To investigate the hypothesis that learning disabilities (LD) play a part in adolescent suicide, all available suicide notes (n = 27) from 267 consecutive adolescent suicides were analyzed for spelling and handwriting errors. The suicide notes were dictated to adolescents with LD and adolescent non-LD controls. The results showed that 89% of the 27 adolescents who committed suicide had signific...

We present a novel phoneme-based student model for spelling training. Our model is data driven, adapts to the user and provides information for, e.g., optimal word selection. We describe spelling errors using a set of features accounting for phonemic, capitalization, typo, and other error categories. We compute the influence of individual features on the error expectation values based on previo...

Orthographic learning refers to the acquisition of knowledge about specific spelling patterns forming words and about general biases and constraints on letter sequences. It is thought to occur by strengthening simultaneously activated visual and phonological representations during reading. Here we demonstrate that a visual perceptual learning procedure that leaves no time for articulation can r...