Do spelling error patterns differ in French-speaking children with and without dyslexia ?

Learning French spelling is a challenge for dyslexic children but also for non-dyslexic readers, due to the high inconsistency of phoneme-grapheme relationships in this language. The question of whether dyslexic children have different spelling error patterns than typical readers has received little attention so far. However, identifying such patterns could be very helpful in diagnosing dyslexia. The aim of this study was to determine whether the spelling error patterns produced by dyslexic children should be characterized as a simple delay or as a deviance in the development of spelling. Seventeen Belgian French-speaking dyslexic children aged 9 to 12 were compared to 17 chronological-age matched controls (CA) and 17 reading-age matched controls (RA) on a written word production task (ORTHO 3 test) from the BELEC battery (Mousty et al., 1994). The task consists of completing 38 written sentences by using 70 words dictated by the examiner. The words are divided into 4 types, as a function of the level of consistency of the target graphemes as well as their morphological characteristics. Furthermore, the lexical frequency of the words in which the target graphemes appear is manipulated. The results show overall that whatever the type of target graphemes, the dyslexic group obtains scores significantly lower than those of the CA group but similar or higher as compared to the RA group. In conclusion, the spelling error patterns produced by dyslexic children seem to reflect a delay rather than a deviation from the normal development of spelling.