Spelling Difficulty: A Major Symptom of Dyslexia

Abstract

Compared to the amount of research done on reading, surprisingly little work has been done on the psychology of how we write. And most of the work done on the writing process has been limited to spelling. Researchers have looked at the strategies one uses in order to spell a word correctly, and much of the work has focused on the spelling errors young writers make, in order to gain insight into the underlying causal factors of the poor spelling. Most commonly, researchers have looked at how well writers spell words in isolation, that is, when the words are dictated in a test, not in the pupils’ own written work (Boder, 1973; Gjessing, 1977).