Inconsistent phoneme-grapheme mappings in opaque orthographies might induce children to rely more on the lexical procedure in order to produce accurate spellings impossible to obtain through non-lexical conversion. By contrast, in shallow orthographies children might obtain reasonable levels of accuracy also using the non-lexical procedure.
Notably, previous cross-linguistic studies focused on a single task or stimulus material e. Such information might be important in characterizing the reliance on lexical vs. The present study is part of a larger investigation devoted to understanding mechanisms and cognitive correlates of literacy acquisition in Italian a language with a mostly regular orthography and English a language with high orthographic irregularity.
The presence of this relatively small set of ambiguous words in spelling allows examining the reliance on lexical spelling also in a shallow orthography such as Italian, in order to compare it with the reliance on the lexical procedure in English. The limited evidence on Italian suggests greater reliance on non-lexical than lexical processing among Italian children as well as longer time to acquire lexical spelling compared to the sub-lexical one.
In a study from second to eighth grade, Tressoldi reported more errors in spelling pseudo-homophones than non-words across all grades, indicating greater reliance on non-lexical than lexical processing among Italian children. Notarnicola et al. These data indicate an earlier and more rapid development for the sub-lexical procedure and a more gradual acquisition of the lexical procedure, consistently with other regular orthographies, such as Czech, Turkish, German, and Spanish for a review, see Caravolas, The analyses on the error types generally confirmed these differential trends: phonologically plausible errors were prevalent at all grades, while all other types of errors decreased with schooling, being present only in first to third grade.
In evaluating the acquisition of spelling skills in two quite different languages, such as English and Italian, it is fundamental to have orthographic materials that are comparable between the two languages. For this reason, in the present study lists of words and non-words were generated matching the two languages for as many psycholinguistic variables as possible.
In order to evaluate both lexical and non-lexical processing the effects of regularity, frequency, lexicality, and length were examined. On the other hand, the regularity regular spelled better than irregular words and length short spelled better than long words effects may be considered as markers of the sub-lexical procedure.
In fact, the regularity effect should be greater if children use the non-lexical procedure; this would allow a good accuracy in spelling regular words while producing a large number of phonological plausible errors i. The length effect reflects more the serial process of phoneme-to-grapheme conversion with lower accuracy when the number of letters to be converted increases than the lexical spelling 1. Several questions emerge from these observations: does orthographic consistency modulate the characteristics of literacy and the reliance on the lexical or sublexical procedure in spelling?
Are crosslinguistic differences long-lasting or are on the foreground only in the initial phases of spelling acquisition? In the present study, we aimed at studying spelling acquisition among English and Italian children during elementary school.
We focused on the spelling ability after some at least 2 years training had been received by the child and also later in the course of elementary school. Due to the different times of starting formal instruction in Italy and England when children are, on average, 6 and 5 years old, respectively , we matched children both on the basis of chronological age and in terms of years of schooling. The inclusion in the study of Italian children attending fifth grade allowed disentangling the influence of school attendance from that of chronological age.
In general, we expected that, due to the inconsistency of their orthography, English children would present more spelling errors than Italian children. As to the profile of responding, we expected that younger English children would resemble Italian children; with greater exposition to the orthographic inconsistency and spelling and reading experience, we expected a larger use of the lexical procedure among English children and then larger frequency and lexicality effects than Italian children.
In particular, we hypothesize that, by prolonged exposure to an inconsistent orthography, older English children learn to place a greater reliance on the lexical procedure that may allow higher levels of accuracy with respect to the grapheme-to-phoneme conversion procedure. Additionally, data on spelling acquisition will be compared to reading data in order to examine whether orthographic consistency modulates in different ways reading and spelling. This comparison was possible since in the reading part of the present study we used the same set of regular stimuli assessing the frequency, lexicality, and length effects used for the assessment of spelling.
By contrast, note that the regularity effect was examined only in spelling, due to the absence of irregular words in Italian reading. To the extent in which spelling requires greater processing demands than reading Bosman and Van Orden, , particularly in the case of lexical representations Tainturier and Rapp, , we expected a larger disadvantage in spelling than reading, even after several years of formal literacy instruction, an effect more evident among English children compared to Italian children.
Criteria for inclusion in the English and Italian sample were: absence of neuro-sensory deficits or cognitive impairment according to Raven's Colored Progressive Matrices 2 , adequate socio-educational conditions and opportunities of literacy acquisition. Children were randomly selected from local public primary schools of the Birmingham area for the English sample and Rome and Naples areas for the Italian sample.
As it regards the chronological match, younger children attended 3rd grade in England and 2nd grade in Italy; older children attended 5th grade in England and 4th grade in Italy. The study was conducted according to the principles of the Helsinki Declaration and was approved by the local committee of the Departments and by the school authorities. Two lists of stimuli for each language were prepared. The first list comprised stimuli and assessed the effects of length 4, 5, 6, and 7—9 letter items and type of stimuli high frequency words, low frequency words and non-words for a total of 10 stimuli in each sub-set see Appendix 1 in Supplementary Material.
High frequency words had a mean frequency of Words were all nouns with regular correspondence between phonemes and graphemes. There were only Italian words with a regular stress i. The sets were balanced for the presence of double consonants, clusters of consonants and of contextual rules Barca et al.
Non-words were created from high frequency words changing one to three letters. Non-words had the same ortho-syllabic difficulty of words in terms of presence of double consonants, clusters of consonants and of contextual rules.
The second list assessed the effect of regularity, and included 30 regular words and 30 irregular words see Appendix 2 in Supplementary Material. On average, words were 6. Irregular words were matched with regular words for ortho-syllabic difficulty presence of double consonants, clusters of consonants and contextual rules , number of letters and word frequency. Words were presented for dictation individually to the children.
Each word was read in a clear, loud and neutral voice, without emphasizing the source of the spelling difficulty. Children had to repeat the words in order to assess they had heard the stimulus correctly. Words and non-words were presented in separate blocks. To avoid priming of non-words from the words they were derived from, the non-word block was presented before the word blocks.
Non-words were dictated in a single quasi-random order. Stimuli from the two sets of words were randomized and presented intermixed together in a single quasi-random order. To make the task not too tiring, words were divided into two separate blocks with a brief pause between them. On a separate day, children were administered a reading test comprising the same sets of words and non-words of the first list described above. Children were presented stimuli either words or non-words singly on the center of a PC screen and were asked to read them aloud as fast and as accurately as possible.
Both RTs and errors were recorded; only accuracy measures will be considered in this report for more details on the procedure see Marinelli et al. At least 20 days elapsed between the reading and spelling tests. In about half of cases, children performed the reading test first and the spelling test afterwards; in the other half, the opposite order was followed.
No detectable differences were found between the two groups with different task orders Fs not significant. The first ANOVA included word frequency high, low and length 4, 5, 6, 7—9 letters as repeated measures; the second one lexicality words, non-words and length 4, 5, 6, 7—9 letters as repeated measures; and the third one regularity regular, irregular words. In each analysis, age young and old children and language English and Italian were entered as between group variables.
The same three analyses were also performed for comparing children on the basis of the number of years of schooling 5th grade Italian and 5th grade English children. In this case language English and Italian was the only between group variable. In both age and years of schooling comparisons, interactions were explored with planned comparisons. For the sake of comparison, we present the size effects for similar analyses carried out on reading accuracy for the frequency and lexicality analyses on the same stimuli Marinelli et al.
Such comparison was not possible in the case of the regularity effect since different forms of irregularity were examined in the case of reading and spelling. Main conditions are illustrated in Figure 1 separately for the English and Italian samples as a function of age.
An inspection of these plots allows for a number of general observations:. Figure 1. Mean percentage of errors in spelling different types of stimuli as a function of age in English upper part and Italian bottom part children. A Shows the children performance in spelling non-words, low frequency words and high frequency words; B represents the performance in spelling regular and irregular words.
Lf, low frequency; hf, high frequency. L4, L5, L6, and L7—9 indicate respectively 4-, 5-, 6-, and 7—9- letters stimuli. Table 1. Table 2. The frequency effect was larger and similar for each words length for English mean diff. In Italian children, the frequency effect was negligible at all lengths except for 6-letter stimuli. Figure 2. Chronological age comparison: frequency by length by language interaction. Lf, low frequency words; hf, high frequency words.
In English, improvement in performance with age was similar at each length mean diff. English children had always a worse performance than Italian children mean diff. For Italian children it was small mean diff. Note that with high frequency words especially for shorter words , older English children were able to compensate their spelling difficulty and obtained similar performance to that of 5th grade Italian children.
The English children displayed higher percentages of errors than Italian children in both the age and school comparisons. A greater increase in performance with age emerged in English than Italian children. English children showed larger frequency effects than Italian ones.
A large length effect was present among younger and older English children. In Italian children, the effect of length was present in younger children although smaller compared to English children and was not present in older children.
This pattern was evident in both the age and school comparisons. For the sake of comparison, Tables 1 , 2 report size effects computed as partial eta squared for spelling and reading performance on the same stimuli for the chronological age comparison and the years of schooling comparison, respectively.
Notably, the size of the frequency effect is well above the reference point for a large effect i. The most noticeable difference between the two tasks is the presence of a large size effect for language in the case of spelling but not reading for which no clear effect is indeed obtained.
Furthermore, also interactions between language and frequency and between language and length indicate large size effects for spelling. No interaction with language reaches a large size effect in the case of reading; a medium size effect is present only in the case of the frequency by length by language interaction. These comparisons indicate that, by the ages tested, general cross-linguistic differences in reading accuracy have largely resolved while they are still quite clear in the case of spelling.
With the exception of the language by age and the language by age by length by lexicality , all interactions were significant. English children showed larger lexicality effects than Italian children in younger diff. Larger cross-linguistic differences were present in spelling non-words compared to words diff.
Moreover, the spelling performance improved with age to a larger extent in spelling words than in spelling non-words in Italian diff. Figure 3. Chronological age comparison: language by age by lexicality interaction.
In the case of non-words, spelling errors increased progressively as a function of the number of letters to be spelled, an effect similar in both languages. Then, cross-linguistic differences in spelling non-words were large but not modulated by length. In the case of words, length modulated the spelling performance of English but not of Italian children for whom the percentage of errors were quite low.
Note that the percentage of errors in spelling words decreased substantially for English children, especially for shorter stimuli. This produced smaller cross-linguistic differences compared to non-words, especially for shorter stimuli. Performance improved with age in the case of words by about More evidence is necessary to determine whether or not a problem with the Hebb repetition effect could be at the basis of the spelling difficulties observed in the present study.
The dyslexic adults did not differ from the non-dyslexic group in the P-O consistency effect. Although studies conducted in other languages with transparent orthographies have reported difficulties in the application of the P-O conversion rules in dyslexic children Caravolas and Violin, ; Angelelli et al.
These results are consistent with the claim that spelling difficulties in developmental dyslexia might vary along the lifespan Wimmer, ; Bishop, ; Snowling and Nation, ; Landerl and Wimmer, ; Angelelli et al.
Namely, they confirmed that problems with P-O correspondences as shown by children with dyslexia are largely remediated in adulthood. Perhaps an initial difficulty to learn the appropriate correspondences between phonemes and graphemes in childhood is overcome due to contact with the language Di Betta and Romani, It seems reasonable to think that a sufficient knowledge of the P-O rules of a language such as Spanish, which is largely transparent concerning the phoneme-to-grapheme correspondences, may be achieved by dyslexics through years of practice in their application.
This may be particularly true in our study, in which the dyslexic participants are highly educated and their frequent exposure to written material is assured. The effect of the type of task was very different between the dyslexic and the non-dyslexic group. The dyslexics produced longer written latencies in direct copy transcoding than in spelling-to-dictation, and the controls showed the opposite pattern. However, the dyslexic group was slower than the control group in both cases.
In future investigations it should be established if this difference reflects a deficiency in producing orthographic representations from visually-presented words or if it reveals separate and accumulative deficits of reading and writing in direct copy transcoding.
For example, it would be interesting to test if the same pattern is observed in a delayed copy transcoding task.
If similar results were obtained when participants had enough time for reading the word, the fact that the dyslexics were slower in copying than in spelling-to-dictation could not be attributed to additional problems during the reading process. In sum, the present study provides evidence of the presence of spelling difficulties in developmental dyslexia.
Even when dyslexics produced correct written responses, the writing process differed from that of normal-reading peers. More importantly, our results are consistent with deficits at the lexical level and at the graphemic buffer level. In contrast, adults with dyslexia showed no differences with the controls in the application of the P-O conversion procedures.
Our results also provide valuable information about the normal writing production process, and specifically about the variations in this process due to the characteristics of the task. However, more evidence is needed to establish the scope of the involvement of lexical and sublexical information in languages with less transparent correspondences between phonemes and graphemes, and how the difference between languages might affect the spelling impairments showed by dyslexics.
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. Afonso, O. Phonological Processing during Handwriting of Isolated Words.
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