Many studies have explored how Language-Minority Bilingual Children (LMBC) read and comprehend, while the way they learn to spell and write has received less attention. This study aimed to assess a comprehensive profile of spelling and writing skills in LMBC, comparing performances of 4th and 5th grade bilingual (n = 74) and monolingual (n = 131)…

This study compared language minority bilingual (LMB) second graders with two groups of monolingual peers (with comparable low SES or with high SES) in a set of literacy skills (reading fluency, spelling, reading and oral comprehension) tested in the target school language (L2 for bilinguals). The aim was to disentangle the roles of bilingualism…

The present study investigated whether morphological processing in reading is influenced by the orthographic consistency of a language or its morphological complexity. Developing readers in Grade 3 and skilled adult readers participated in a reading aloud task in four alphabetic orthographies (English, French, German, Italian), which differ in…

According to a language-integrated view of spelling development, learning to spell involves the same language-learning skills across alphabetic systems. A prediction based on this view is that the same spelling training should be equally effective for learning to spell in a shallow (Italian, native language) or an opaque (English, additional…

The purpose of this study was to investigate consistency in spelling skills across 2 different tasks of written production (dictation vs. composition) and stability of performance across 4 different grades. We assessed 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders' spelling performance through 4 tasks: 2 dictation tasks (passage and sentences) and 2 composition…

It had been hypothesized that, in developmental dyslexia (DD), an implicit learning deficit explains children's problems in encoding the phoneme-grapheme correspondences underlying the writing system and thus the development of spelling skills. The present study tested the efficacy of an intervention to facilitate implicit learning of…

Previous studies with English-speaking children showed that handwriting and spelling abilities played a critical role in the development of writing fluency and quality, particularly during the transition from the kindergarten to primary school; in contrast, studies dealing with orthographically transparent languages found small or no relations…

This study analyzed the spelling skills of Italian children as a function of school experience. We examined the writing performances of 465 first- to eighth-grade normal readers on a spelling test that included regular words, context-sensitive regular words, words with ambiguous transcription, and regular pseudowords. Based on the dual-route model…

This book provides a unique and accessible account of current research on reading and dyslexia in different orthographies. While most research has been conducted in English, this text presents cross-language comparisons to provide insights into universal aspects of reading development and developmental dyslexia in alphabetic and non-alphabetic…