Component Spelling Skills of College Students with Childhood Diagnoses of Dyslexia

This article examines the component spelling skills of adults with childhood diagnoses of dyslexia in an effort to identify some of the basic impairments associated with their spelling problems and to determine if these adults ever attain age- or level-appropriate competence. College students with childhood diagnoses of dyslexia were given a dictation task, a spelling-recognition task, and a nonword spelling task to assess their use and knowledge of sound-spelling, orthographic, morphologic, and visual information. Their performance on these tasks was compared to that of control groups of normal college students and of normal grade 6 (matched with the dyslexics on the basis of their standardized spelling and reading test scores). Dyslexics' spelling problems were primarily associated with their failure to acquire knowledge of the mappings between spelling and sounds of English. Their use and knowledge of morphological (higher level linguistic) information and of visual information for spelling, however, is predictable from their reading and spelling levels. This last set of results reflects the fact that the dyslexics in this study engaged in much reading and that exposure to written words plays an important role in the development of these specific component spelling skills.