Do Adult Literacy Students Make the Same Word-Reading and Spelling Errors as Children Matched for Word-Reading Age?

In this study, an analysis was undertaken of the word-reading and spelling error patterns of 72 adult literacy students and 72 normally developing child readers who read words at the same grade-equivalent levels. Their utilization of orthographic and phonological strategies to read sight words, to decode nonwords, to spell words, and to detect rhyming words was analyzed. Results indicated that when encountering difficulties adults were less likely than children to use phonological strategies and were more likely than children to rely on visual or orthographic processes. Adults' misreadings were more often real words whereas children's misreadings revealed decoding mistakes. Adults' spellings were more often prephonetic or nonphonetic than children's spellings. Adults had difficulty detecting rhyming pairs of words unless the words had similar spellings. Findings are consistent with the view that adults' poor graphophonemic and decoding skills contribute to their difficulties reading and spelling words.