1 ' 4 TOTEREAU, THEVENIN, FAYOL

Keeney, T. J., & Wolfe, J. (1972). The acquisition of agreement in English. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 11, 698-705.

Kess, J. F. (1992). Psycholinguistics. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Kilborn, K. (1991). Selective impairment of grammatical morphology due to induced stress in

normal listeners: Implications for aphasia. Brain and Language, 41, 275-288. Levy, Y. (1987). The wug technique revisited. Cognitive Development, 2, 71-87. Logan, G. D. (1988a). Toward an instance theory of automatization. Psychological Review, 95

492-527. Logan, G. D. (1988b). Automaticity, resources, and memory. Human Factors, 30,583-598. Logan, G. D. (1992). Shapes of reaction-time distributions and shapes of learning curves. Journal

of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 18, 883-914. Lovell, K., & Dixon, E. M. (1967). The growth of the control of grammar in imitation, compre­

hension and production. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 8, 31-39. MacWhinney, B. (1978). The acquisition of morphophonology. Monographs of the Society for

Research in Child Development, 43 (1-2, Serial No. 174). Mervis, C. B., & Johnson, K. E. (1991). Acquisition of the plural morpheme: A case study. Devel­

opmental Psychology, 27, 222-235. Newfield, M. K., & Schlanger, B. B. (1968). The acquisition of English morphology by normal

and educable mentally retarded children. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 1J, 693-706. Nicolaci-da Costa, A. & Harris, M. (1983). Redundancy of syntactic information: An aid to young

children's comprehension of sentential number. British Journal of Psychology, 74, 343-352. Nicolaci-da Costa, A., & Harris, M. (1984). Young children's comprehension of number markers.

British Journal of Psychology, 2,105-111. Nicolson, R. I., & Fawcett, A. J. (1990). Automaticity: A new framework for dyslexia research?

Cognition, 35, 159-182. Siegler, R. S. (1987). The peril of averaging data over strategies: An example from children's

addition. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 106, 250-264, Solomon, M. (1972). Stem endings and the acquisition of inflections. Language Learning 22,43-50 Winitz, H., Sanders, K., & Kort, J. (1981). Comprehension and production of the /3-z/ plural

allomorph. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 10, 259-271.

C H A P T E R

7

LEXICAL SPELLING PROCESSES IN READING DISABLED

FRENCH-SPEAKING CHILDREN

Jesus Alegria Philippe Mousty

Free University of Brussels

The lexical spelling processes of reading disabled French-speaking children were examined by asking the participants to spell frequent and infrequent words containing nondominant transcriptions of inconsistent graphonemes (e.g, /k/ spelled "qu" as in "quatre," the dominant spelling for /k/ being "c"). These children were matched with normal controls on their reading ability level. Spelling at the lowest reading level already depended on word fre­quency in both groups of children. As reading ability progressed, the effects of word frequency increased. However, this increase was weaker in the reading disabled than in the control children. A tentative explanation sup­poses that word identification processes differ in the two groups. Disabled readers use partial cues that allow reading but do not supply the ortho­graphic lexicon with complete representations of words.

French orthography belongs to the family of deep orthographic systems (Gleitman & Rozin, 1977; Klima, 1972). It represents language at the phonologi­cal level but simultaneously includes aspects of morphology and syntax. This fact often creates conflicting situations. For instance, the morphological and syntactic aspects of language not marked at the phonological level can, nevertheless, be orthographically represented. For example, the second and third person singular as well as the third person plural are homophonous in several tenses of French verbs: "tu manges" (you eat), "il mange" (\\t eats), "ils mangent" (they eat) are all pronounced /mâ3s/. Different spellings, however, are systematically associated with each morpheme: "es," "e," and "ent" (see Totereau, Thévenin, & Fayol. chap. 6, this volume).

l i é ALEGRIA AND MOUSTY

French orthography also presents complexities at the phoneme-graph­eme translation level. For example, the "graphoneme"1 /v/—> "v" is consis­tent: grapho-phonological knowledge is sufficient to correctly spell the pho­neme /v/. However, the graphonemes /ä/—> "an" and iy~> "g" are inconsistent, "en" and "j" are frequent alternatives, respectively. Specific lexical knowledge is indispensable in order to spell "danger" (danger), in­stead of "denger," "danjer," or "denjer."

Therefore, in order to spell French correctly, the child must possess and use a number of linguistic abilities—phonological, morphological, lexical, and syntactic—that go far beyond the sound-spelling transcription rules. A com­puter simulation study has shown that pure sound-spelling transcription rules allow correct spelling of 88% of phonemes but only about 50% of words (Véronis, 1988).

It is widely admitted that two.basic spelling procedures are necessary to explain the empirical data: the phonological procedure that constructs spell­ings using sound-spelling transcription rules and the lexical procedure that retrieves spellings of known words from an orthographic lexicon (cf. Brown & Ellis, 1994; Frith, 1980a). Evidence in favor of this view comes from the literature about acquired spelling troubles (Zesiger & de Partz, chap. 3, this volume). On the one hand, patients who have lost the lexical procedure but not the phonological one have been described. These surface dysgraphic patients show a severe impairment in spelling irregular words, but a rea­sonably good ability to spell regular words and pseudowords (see Beauvois & Dérouesné, 1981, for a French case and Hatfield & Patterson, 1983, for an English case). On the other hand, phonological dysgraphic patients show the opposite pattern of disorders. They have severe difficulty manipulating phonological units, as attested to by their poor performance on pseudoword spelling, but a preserved capacity to spell frequent, even irregular, words (see Shallice, 1981, for a rather clear case).

Evidence for the dissociation between these two procedures has been also found in developmental disorders. Boder (1973), for example, proposed a taxonomy including dysphonetic children who have deficits similar to those of phonological dysgraphics and dyseidetic children who have deficits similar to surface dysgraphics. Of special interest are the cases of adults who show developmental syndromes similar to the acquired syndromes but who, nev­ertheless, have reached good literacy levels (Campbell & Butterworth, 1985; Funnell & Davison, 1989; Goulandris & Snowling, 1991).

Current models of reading and spelling development propose a mecha­nism involving the articulation of lexical and phonological procedures. It

'According to Véronis (1986), a graphoneme is the couple of a grapheme and its phonematic counterpart. The concept of grapheme corresponds to the functional spelling units of Venezky (1970). So, /s/—> s (serpent), /s/—> c (cigarette), /s/—> f (notion), and /s/—> sc (science) are examples of French graphonemes.

7. LEXICAL SPELLING IN THE READING DISABLED 117

has been suggested that the elaboration of lexical representations results from the activity of the phonological process. The identification of a par­ticular word using phonology progressively elaborates the corresponding orthographic representation that would allow its subsequent lexical identi­fication and spelling. The shift proposed by Frith (1985) from alphabetic to orthographic reading and spelling procedures is a good example of the manner in which these procedures can be articulated in a developmental model (see Ehri, 1980, 1991; Morton, 1989; Perfetti, 1991).

The development of the phonological and lexical procedures in normal and reading disabled French-speaking children has been already examined in earlier studies (Alegria & Mousty, 1994, 1996). This chapter further ana­lyzes the development of the lexical process in the context of reading and spelling disability. We concentrate on the spelling of inconsistent, nondomi-nant graphonemes, a procedure that inevitably requires the use of the lexical process. The dominance of an inconsistent graphoneme refers to the frequency of its phoneme-grapheme transcription rule relative to the other possible transcriptions of the same phoneme. For example, the graphoneme /s/—> "c" is nondominant because "c" is, in French, a less frequent transcrip­tion of the phoneme /s/ than "s" (/s/—> "s" is the dominant graphoneme).

Our previous results showed that the performance on such inconsistent nondominant graphonemes was basically nil in beginning spellers, normal as well as reading disabled, indicating that they did not possess an ortho­graphic lexicon at this early stage of spelling development. These children systematically used the dominant version of inconsistent graphonemes. The simplest way to account for these results is to suppose that the first steps in spelling are based on a simplified set of rules introduced most likely by explicit classroom instruction rather than by reading activity. Afterwards, the evolution of spelling with reading ability differed in the control and the reading disabled groups. The performance on the inconsistent, nondomi-nant items increased between second and third grades much more rapidly in the normal group than in the disabled group (Alegria & Mousty, 1994). This acceleration in the spelling development of such items unambiguously indicates that, during this period of time, the orthographic lexicon incorpo­rates a large number of relatively infrequent words in normal readers but, for reasons that remain to be determined, not in disabled readers. Consis­tent with these speculations, a second study considering normal and dis­abled children matched on reading level showed weaker word frequency effects in the latter group than in the former group (Alegria & Mousty, 1996). If, as proposed earlier, word representations allowing lexical spelling de­velop as a result of reading activity, these results suggest that reading processes might differ in normal and disabled readers.

The spelling evolution of four inconsistent, nondominant graphonemes is investigated in this chapter. Part of the data come from the study pre-

f IS ALEGRIA AND MOUSTY

viously mentioned (Alegria & Mousty, 1996). Two graphonemes (/s/e, i—> "c," and /z/e, i—> "z") already examined are reanalyzed together with two new ones: AA, o—> "qu," and /§/#—> "ain."2. As stated before, the correct spelling of those graphonemes depends on the existence of an orthographic lexicon. Besides, it has been hypothesized that the development of an or­thographic lexicon should depend on the number of encounters with the individual written words, so strong frequency effects were expected as reading level increases. An important question is whether reading disabled and normal children that have reached the same reading level possess equivalent effects of frequency in word spelling.

METHOD

Participants

The sample consisted of 38 reading disabled and 75 control children. Reading disabled participants came from a special school for dyslexic children. According to a routine procedure in Belgium, these children had been detected by an official institution that decided to send them to this special school. They have reading and spelling problems but are of normal intelli­gence (they must have an IQ of at least 85). The group of control children included 19 participants tested at the beginning of Grade 2,22 at the end of Grade 2, 18 in Grade 3, and 16 in Grade 5. They came from an elementary school where a phonics teaching method was used.

For each participant, overall reading efficiency was assessed with a forced-choice sentence completion test (subtest L3 from the ORLEC battery; Lobrot, 1973). This test consists of 36 sentences with a missing word. Five alternatives are proposed on each trial and the children have to fill as many sentences as they can in 5 minutes. The score is the percentage of correct responses obtained in this fixed period of time. As the test goes along, the complexity of the task increases; words become less frequent and syntactic, cognitive and pragmatic aspects of the sentences become more complex. The test thus provides a global measure of reading comprehension that includes both specific (efficient written-word identification processes) and nonspecific (general linguistic and cognitive knowledge) abilities.

Three reading level subgroups of reading disabled and control children were then matched on the basis of their Lobrot reading scores. Table 7.1 provides the characteristics of these subgroups.

2The notation adopted here concerning the phonemic part of graphonemes specifies the orthographic context in which phonemes are included. For example, /s/e, i represents the phoneme /s/ followed by the letter e or ('. Similarly, /ê/# represents the phoneme /£/ at the end of a word.

7. LEXICAL SPELLING IN THE READING DISABLED 119

TABLE 7.1 Characteristics oi the Disabled and Control

Subjects Matched on Reading Level

Croup

Disabled

Control

Conditions

Reading Level

1 2 3

1 2 3

N

11 8

19

15 28 32

Lobrot Scores

6.8 (0-14) 28.5 (19-33) 54.8 (42-81)

7.2 (0-14) 25.8 (17-36) 57.0 (42-100)

Age (yrs;mths)

10;10 (9;4-12;l) 12:2 (10:3-13;6) 12;9 (10;6-14;5)

7;4 (6;9-8;l) 7;9 (6;9-ll;3) 9;9 (7;8-ll'4)

The spelling task consisted of 20 words included in sentences. Six (or four) words, half high-frequency and half low-frequency, were selected for each of the four graphonemes: /s/e, i—> "c," /z/e, i—> "z," /k/a, o—> "qu," and /?/#—> "ain" (see Table 7.2). The classification of words as a function of frequency was made according to frequency counts collected on a corpus of French literary texts (Trésor de la langue française, 1971) and available in the computerized lexical database BRULEX (Content, Mousty, & Radeau, 1990). Obviously, literary texts do not correspond very well to the printed materials primary school children usually see. For this reason, a group of 50 fourth graders were presented with the whole list of words used in the experiment. They were asked to evaluate on a 5-point scale the frequency with which they had earlier seen these printed words: (1) never seen, (2) rarely, (3) from time to time, (4) often, (5) very often. The results are summarized in Table 7.2.

The four graphonemes examined were inconsistent and nondominant. That is, they all have a competitor that is more frequent. The first two items, /s/ and /z/, are spelled "s" more often than "c" and "z," respectively. This has been established both on the basis of statistical counts (Véronis, 1986) as well as empirically in a pseudoword spelling task (Alegria & Mousty,

TABLE 7.2 Mean Subjective Frequencies (on a 5-point scale) for the

Low- and High-Frequency Words Used for Each Graphoneme

Graphoneme High-Frequency Words Low-Frequency Words

/s/—> "c" del cirque cinéma 3.72 cigale macédoine citerne 2.11 /z/—> V douze gazette 2.75 chimpanzé trapéziste 2.26 /k/—> "qu" quotidien quatre 3.24 quotient marquage 1.83 /ê/—> "ain" main bain pain 4.01 lusain poulain êtain 1.92

520 ALEGRIA AND MOUSTY

1996). The /k/a, o—> "qu" graphoneme has a far more dominant competitor, "c," which represents 96.9% of the occurrences (Véronis). The graphoneme /s/#—> "ain" has a competitor, "in," which is dominant in word endings (42.9% and 31.0% for "in" and "ain," respectively). The "in" spelling is even more dominant if its position in the word is not taken into account. In word-initial position, with the contribution of the morphological "in-" (in words such as "invisible" and "incapable") it reaches 98.8%. This creates a strong general bias toward the /£/#—> "in" graphoneme.

Procedure

Children were tested in groups in their classrooms. They were first presented with the pseudoword-spelling task not discussed in this chapter. Then the word-spelling task was presented. Items from each condition were randomly mixed within each task. In the word-spelling task, participants were given an answer sheet on which the carrier sentence was printed with the word containing the target graphoneme missing. The experimenter read the whole sentence aloud and then repeated the missing word in isolation. The child was asked to Write it down. Only the Ietter(s) corresponding to the target phoneme was(were) considered in the analyses (i.e., if the word "cinéma" /sinema/ was used to test the /s/e, i—> "c" graphoneme, only the critical letter "c" was taken into account).

RESULTS

The mean percentages of correct responses per graphoneme for frequent and infrequent words as a function of group and reading level are presented in Fig. 7.1. A first ANOVA was run with group (control vs. reading disabled children) and reading level (1st, 2nd, and 3rd level) as between-subject factors, and frequency (low vs. high) and graphonemes (/s/—> "c," /z/—> "z," /k/—> "qu," and /e/—> "ain") as within-subject factors. As expected, the effects of frequency and reading level were highly significant: PÇ1, 107) = 550.73; p < .001, and F(2,107) = 80.37; p < .001, respectively, as well as their interaction, F(2,107)=23.77; p < .001. An important question in this experiment concerned the presence of frequency effects at the lowest reading level. Partial analysis showed that frequency was already significant at the first reading level, PHI, 24) = 28.76; p < .001. The main graphoneme effect was significant, ^ 3 , 231) = 34.95; p < .001, as well as its interaction with frequency, F(ß, 321) = 31,88; p < .001.

The main group effect was significant, F(l, 107) = 20.89; p < .001, indicating that the percentage of correct responses was greater in the control group than in the reading disabled group even though their reading level had been

7. LEXICAL SPELLING IN THE READING DISABLED 121

READING DISABLED NORMAL CONTROLS laa 100 U

- • - High Frequency so 80

-O- Low Frequency 60 60

40 40

20 20

l i

100 100

BO 80

60 cn 60

N 40 40 O)

CO 20 20

*. m

100 100 O

ao 90 cu

60 6C 0)

40 40

ra 0) 20 20

100 100

B0 30

SO SO

TO 40 40

20 20

L

1 1

Reading Level

FIG. 7.1. Mean percentage of correct spelling per graphoneme as a function of word frequency and reading level for reading disabled and control children matched on reading level.

equated. The group-by-reading-level interaction was significant, too, rJ2,107) = 5.55; p < .001, indicating that the difference between groups increases with reading level. Two interactions (group by frequency and group by gra­phoneme), however, were nonsignificant (Fs < 1).

These results reveal that reading level gives different predictions con­cerning lexical spelling in normal and disabled readers. Inspection of Fig. 7.1 suggests that the performance with low-frequency words allows us to predict rather precisely the performance on frequent words, independently

122 ALEGRIA AND MOUSTY

"ô [TZl T?' "" b 0 , h n 0 r m a l "** readl"g d t e a b '«> ""<«»«• m order o explore th,s ,ssue, a scatterplot considering the score obtained on hta*

the normal group and the reading disabled group r Ï p e c S Th. f '"

« n ' ,h e r "" 5 ™S S"Sh"y *~ to '»^'^upTaSnÎ S,er"

Deriorm?n,el " ? * , C° n S i d e r i nS t h e r e a d i n § «ores as a function of the performance on low-frequency words was performed in order to evaluate the predictions about reading differing from group to group The s c a t t e X appears in the bottom panel of Fis 7 2 As à ™ » * Z s c a t t e r P l o t

tionci riiff«r^. A « ' . S ' expected, the regression equa-2 n r^Q M V J " t 6 r C e p t W a S h i g h e r i n t h e d i s a b l e d than in the normal

group (26.9 and 14.5, respectively), and the slope was weaker in the former group than in the latter group (0.74 and 0.98, respectively The IearTon correlation coefficients were 0.40 and 0.81 in the disabled anc.the normal readers, respectively (ps < 0.01). The ANOVA on reading scores per group considenng low-frequency word scores as covariates showed that the group effect was, as expected, highly significant, /?1,110) = 7.25; p < 01 W^en the

C O N C L U S I O N

In order to spell an important proportion of French words lexical reore entations containing orthographic specifications are nece sary Earlier

studies (Alegria & Mousty. 1994,1996) have shown that children a t ï e lowês reading level do not possess these representations. C h i l d n ^ S Ä to spell inconsistent nondominant graphonemes (i.e.. /s/e-i-> V ) usfng their

^ m a i ï - t r r C r i p t i 0 n W e + " > "S"> Subsequent s udies have compared reading disabled and normal children matched on reading leveT^en asked tc> spell low-frequency and high-frequency words c o n ^ ^ £ £ nondommant graphonemes, reading disabled children were inferior to nor ma, children, despite their matched reading level (Alegria & Mousty 1996 Ï S ^ W Z ? * * « * — * • - p a r i s o n of t h e s S

Previous results suggested that children start spelling with a simplified

anv°Lï 6 li PrH°babHly " T i r e d t h r ° U g h C l a S S r 0 0 m é t i o n s and wShout any lexically based spelling. The present results partially confirm hese notions. The results obtained with inconsistent, * J L J L & Z £ £

o 100 Cd

Ü

E 80 CJ ü

CD A O O O A O O O a

en C 60 o oo«oo

o o CJ C) fli A crj O

40

O A O o

CJ 3 2 0 , r A

C) o <D a u_

; o rj>

. . 0 A _ i i

100

80 >>-

ü CJ

o Ü o <s> 60

eu

G)

40 en O

ca <D iï O ce 20 (î O

0 „ » O.--- O ~ 0 f o

o 1 I I

' . . •• 1 . . . L 1

0 20 40 60 80 100

Low-Frequency Word Spelling (Percent Correct)

FIG. 7.2. High-frequency word spelling (top graph) and reading (bottom graph) by low-frequency word spelling, with regression lines for reading disabled (solid line) and control children (dashed line).

124 ALEGRIA AND MOUSTY

are rather poor at the lowest reading level in both groups of children. At this level, they tend to spell using the dominant graphonemes (/s/—> "s" for instance). Almost 100% of the errors made were of this sort.

Some signs of lexical spelling, however, have been observed at the lowest reading level considered here. Reliable and substantial frequency effects were already present for the graphoneme /8/—> "ain." The reason is prob­ably that the frequent words containing this graphoneme were indeed the most frequent among those used in the experiment, as indicated by both the published frequency counts and the subjective frequency evaluations collected among primary school children.

In more general terms, the differences observed between graphonemes can be attributed, at least partially, to differences in the frequency of the carrier words. In the low-frequency condition, performance was quite ho­mogeneous across graphonemes. Accordingly, subjective frequency evalu­ations for these items showed rather small variations between graphone­mes. On the contrary, in the high-frequency condition, such evaluations revealed important differences among graphonemes, and these differences were reflected in spelling performance. The frequent words containing, for instance, the graphoneme /e/~> "ain" were clearly the most frequent. There­fore, it is not surprising that, for this graphoneme, frequency effects ap­peared more precociously and showed a rapid evolution with reading level. The words containing the graphonemes /z/—> *V and /k/—> "qu" were the less frequent and, as a matter of fact, produced the poorest spelling per­formances. An important question for future research will be to determine whether word frequency alone can fully explain spelling performance. The alternative view consists in attributing an autonomous role to some gra­phonemes, possibly in some particular contexts.

The most important fact revealed in the present study was that reading disabled children were poorer at lexical spelling than normal readers matched on reading level. This suggests that their word identification proc­esses allow them to read but not to develop an efficient orthographic lexi­con. The results of the multivariate analysis are in agreement with this notion. Disabled readers showed higher reading performance than normal readers paired on spelling level, and this was especially true at the lowest spelling levels. This finding suggests that more reading exposure is neces­sary to the disabled readers to achieve the storage of orthographic word representations. It is interesting to contrast these results with those relating the spelling of infrequent and frequent words. In this case, disabled and normal readers shared exactly the same regression equation, suggesting a unique mechanism of spelling in both groups of participants. This does not seem to be the case for reading.

As mentioned previously, the mechanism proposed to explain the devel­opment of orthographic representations supposes that the successful iden-

7. LEXICAL SPELLING IN THE READING DISABLED 125

tification of individual words while reading progressively elaborates repre­sentations that allow subsequent lexical reading and spelling (Ehri, 19ÖU; Frith, 1980b; Gough & Juel, 1991; Jorm & Share, 1983; Perfetti, 1991; Stanovich, 1986). According to this account, phonologically based word identification processes are the dynamic element in the elaboration of lexical repre­sentations of words. The results obtained with normal and disabled readers suggest that reading level, as it was evaluated in this experiment, gives different predictions in each group concerning the size of the corpus of orthographic representations that the participant possesses and/or the quality of the items contained in this corpus. Two factors might explain this fact. One concerns the word-identification processes and the other concerns the storage of orthographic representations.

Let's first consider the notion that disabled and normal readers matched on reading level might differ in their word identification processes. Some authors have systematically compared reading and spelling abilities in the same children. They have found that some of them present a homogeneous pattern of success; they are either good readers and good spellers or poor readers and poor spellers. Some children, however, present a mixed pattern; they are good readers but poor spellers (Brück & Waters, 1990; Frith, 1980a; Waters, Brück, & Seidenberg, 1985). A discrepancy between reading and spelling is not surprising. Indeed, spelling involves recalling, a more difficult activity than reading, which is an act of recognition. Frith quite reasonably noted that reading can be achieved using partial cues, whereas spelling requires full cues. It has been demonstrated that the mixed children reach reading levels that are equivalent to those of the good readers-good spellers by using compensatory reading procedures (Brück & Waters, 1990; Waters et al., 1985). Their high performance on reading tests was obtained by using sentence context. Several studies (e.g., Perfetti & Hogaboam, 1975; Perfetti & Roth, 1981; Stanovich, 1980) showed that poor readers' word identification depended to a greater extent on sentence context. All readers can take advantage of context to predict the nature of the following items in a sentence, but orthographic word processing in good readers is too fast to allow guessing to be revealed. The basic feature that characterizes good readers-good spellers is their word processing mechanisms; these mecha­nisms are complete, (i.e., in Frith's terms, based on full cues instead of on partial cues, as is the case for poor readers). On the basis of these data, it is tempting to speculate that word processing based on full cues is a nec­essary condition for the elaboration of an orthographic lexicon that could be used in word spelling.

Another potential explanation for reading disabled students having diffi­culties developing an orthographic lexicon has been illustrated by Goulan­dris and Snowling (1991). According to these authors, surface dyslexia may be due to a nonspecific visual memory deficit. They have described the case

126 ALEGRIA AND MOUSTY

of a successful reader presenting a developmental surface syndrome with severe difficulties in tasks requiring visual recognition of geometric shapes and reproduction of Greek letters or abstract letter-like sequences. They assume that this impairment has prevented the participant from developing detailed orthographic representations of words. Their account may, in prin­ciple, explain the use of partial cues in reading. This tendency simply results from the participant's inability to store full cues because of a general visual memory deficit. This notion contrasts with the influential criticism provided by Vellutino (1979) against peripheral accounts of dyslexia. However, more recent evidence based mainly on brief presentations and psychophysical procedures (see Aaron, 1993; Lovegrove, Martin, & Slaghuis, 1986; Love-grove, Slaghuis, Bowling, Nelson, & Geeves, 1986; Slaghuis, Lovegrove, & Davidson, 1993) suggested that subtle visual deficits may exist in the reading disabled and that the crucial variables may not have been clearly identified. In addition, the case reported by Goulandris and Snowling suggests that peripheral deficits may characterize at least some disabled readers (see the cases reported by Rayner, Murphy, Henderson, & Pollatsek, 1989, or by Valdois, Gérard, Vanault, & Dugas, 1995).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The writing of this chapter was supported by the National Fund for Scientific Research (Loterie Nationale, convention 8.4505.92) and by the Ministry of Education of the Belgian French-speaking Community (Concerted Research Action, convention 91/96-148). Josiane Lechat, Eva Debaix, and Nicole De-donder participated in data collection. We are grateful to the staff and children from the schools Etablissement dEnseignement Primaire Spécial (Court-St-Etienne) and Ecole de la Sainte Famille (Braine-Lalleud).

Correspondence concerning this chapter should be addressed to Jesus Alegria or Philippe Mousty, Laboratoire de Psychologie Expérimentale, Uni­versité Libre de Bruxelles, Avenue F.D. Roosevelt, 50, C. P. I. 191, B-1050 Brussels, Belgium. Electronic mail may be sent to alegria@ulb.ac.be or pmousty@u I b. ac.be

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of French-speaking, normal and disabled children. In G. D. A. Brown & N. C. Ellis (Eds.), Handbook of spelling: Theory, process and intervention (pp. 211-226). Chichester, NY: Wiley.

7. LEXICAL SPELLING IN THE READING DISABLED 127

Alegria J., & Mousty, P. (1996). The development of spelling procedures in French-speaking, normal and reading disabled children: Effects of frequency and lexicality. Journal of Experi­mental Child Psychology, 63, 312-338.

Beauvois. M.-F., & Dérouesnê, J. (1981). Lexical or orthographic dysgraphia. Brain, 104, 21-50. Boder, E, (1973). Developmental dyslexia: A diagnostic approach based on three atypical read­

ing-spelling patterns. Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology, 15. 663-687. Brown, G. D. A„ & Ellis, N. C. (1994). Handbook of spelling: Theory, process and intervention.

Chichester, NY: Wiley. Brück, M., & Waters, G. S. (1990). An analysis of the component spelling and reading skills of

good readers-good spellers, good readers-poor spellers, and poor readers-poor spellers. In T. H. Carr & B. A. Levy (Eds.), Reading and its development (pp. 161-206). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

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C H A P T E R

8

LEARNING TO SPELL IN THE CLASSROOM

Linda Allai University of Geneva

Skill in spelling, even more than skill in reading or in mathematics, is primarily a product of school learning. One might argue that all research on spelling acquisition, even when conducted in a developmental perspective, is invari­ably concerned with learning shaped in a classroom setting. The focus of the present chapter is on the conditions of learning to spell in the classroom, particularly during the first 6 years of schooling. It examines alternative instructional approaches, proposed activities and tools, aims and observed outcomes. The chapter is based on literature reviews and presentations of research conducted both in English-speaking and in French-speaking coun­tries. Without attempting to cover all curricular trends, it identifies the main features of the most widely adopted instructional methods.

Over the past 20 years, a large number of publications have presented instructional approaches designed to foster students' writing competency (e.g., Chiss, Laurent, Meyer, Romian, &Schneuwly, 1987; Dipardo &Freedman, 1988; Englert, Raphael, & Anderson, 1992; Graves, 1983; Scardamalia & Berei­ter, 1986; Turco, 1988). In most cases, priority is given to higher order processes of text production (planning, revising, sentence generation), whereas lower order processes such as spelling tend to be neglected. Re­searchers in the area of language instruction often seem to share the attitudes of teachers and students for whom spelling is a necessary but altogether disliked component of the school curriculum (Downing, DeStefano, Rich, & Bell, 1984).

As a school subject, spelling can cover varying ranges of content, thus making it difficult to compare research conducted in different countries.