Orthographic knowledge predicts reading and spelling skills over and above general intelligence and phonological awareness

There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

Abstract

It is widely accepted that general intelligence and phonological awareness contribute to children’s acquisition of reading and spelling skills. A further candidate in this regard is orthographic knowledge (i.e., the knowledge about permissible letter patterns). It consists of two components, word-specific (i.e., the knowledge of the spelling of specific words) and general orthographic knowledge (i.e., the knowledge about legal letter patterns of a writing system). Among German students, previous studies have shown that word-specific orthographic knowledge contributes to both reading and spelling. The results regarding general orthographic knowledge and its contribution to reading and spelling are inconsistent. The major goal of the present study was to determine the incremental predictive value of orthographic knowledge for reading and spelling skills among German elementary-school children ( N = 66), over and above the contribution of general intelligence and phonological awareness. The second goal was to examine whether there is a difference between the two subtypes of orthographic knowledge in the amount of their respective contribution to reading and spelling performance. The results show that word-specific as well as general orthographic knowledge contribute to both reading and spelling performance, over and above intelligence and phonological awareness. Furthermore, it reveals that both word-specific and general orthographic knowledge explain more variance of spelling compared to reading. Possible explanations for these results, limitations, and implications of the study are being discussed.

Related collections

Most cited references 18

Record: found
Abstract: not found
Book: not found

How Children Learn to Write Words

Rebecca Treiman, Brett Kessler (2014)

0 comments Cited 19 times – based on 0 reviews

Bookmark

Record: found
Abstract: found
Book: not found

Beginning to Spell : A Study of First-Grade Children A Study of First-Grade Children

Rebecca Treiman (1993)

This groundbreaking study on the psycholinguistics of spelling presents the author's original empirical research on spelling and supplies the theoretical framework necessary to understand how children's ability to write is related to their ability to speak a language. The author explores areas in a field dominated by work traditionally concerned with the psychodynamics of reading skills and, in so doing, highlights the importance of learning to spell for both psycholinguists and educators, since as they begin to spell, children attempt to represent the phonological, or sound form, of words. The study of children's spelling can shed light on the nature of phonological systems and can illuminate the way sounds are organized into larger units, such as syllables and words. Research on children's spelling leads directly to an understanding of the way phonological knowledge is acquired and how phonological systems change with the development of reading and writing ability. In addition to this insight concerning cognitive processes, the findings presented here have implications for how spelling should be taught and why some writing systems are easier to master than others. The work will interest a wide range of cognitive and developmental psychologists, psycholinguists, and educational psychologists, as well as linguists and educators interested in psycholinguistics.