Spelling ability in congenital dysarthria: Evidence against articulatory coding in translating between phonemes and graphemes

Abstract Seven physically handicapped teenagers with varying degrees of motor speech impairment (dysarthria) were compared with seven physically handicapped control children with normal speech. There was no difference between the two groups in ability to decide whether or not two written words or non-words were homonymous, ability to spell real words or ability to spell non-words. Previous studies using concurrent articulation with normal subjects, and others examining spelling errors in clinical groups, had suggested that an articulatory code was implicated in spelling by phoneme-to-grapheme rules. However, if this were so, then the dysarthric group should be impaired in spelling by phoneme-to-grapheme rules, since they had difficulty in producing distinctive articulations of many speech sounds. The lack of difference in spelling ability, types of spelling errors, and non-word spelling between the two groups indicates that the code that is used in spelling by sound-to-letter rules is not based on articulatory processes, but is a higher-level abstract phonemic code.