Comparative study reveals increased spelling errors and phonological deficits in adult dyslexic students, indicating ongoing linguistic challenges into adulthood.
Essays written by a group of 16 adult student dyslexics and 16 of their peers, matched for age, gender, and subject area, were compared on a number of dimensions. Analysis of the scripts revealed that the dyslexics wrote more slowly and produced shorter essays. The groups did not differ in sentence length or in the location of sentence boundaries. Dyslexics used more monosyllabic words and fewer polysyllabic words. Their spelling error rate was much greater than that of the controls, both overall and in most error categories, and their misspellings provided substantial evidence of a phonemic transcription strategy. Analysis of errors attributable to phonological impairment, spelling knowledge, and lexical misretrievals revealed all these to be more frequent in the dyslexics, but only in the case of phonological impairment did dyslexics produce proportionately more errors, suggesting a specific problem. These data are consistent with previous research suggesting a continuing phonological deficit in adult dyslexics.
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Sterling et al. (1998) studied this question.
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