Background: Spelling is a vital component of literacy. This is because spelling includes multiple metalinguistic components, such as phoneme-grapheme awareness, orthographic awareness and morphophonemic knowledge. Despite this, there remains, to date, insufficient literature on spelling in the Southern Bantu languages and, more specifically, in…

Purpose: Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) demonstrate general spelling difficulties. This study investigated accuracy on and sensitivity to silent letters in spelling in children with and without DLD. Investigating silent-letter production provides a window into orthographic and morphological knowledge and enhances understanding…

The present study addresses the scope of the writing difficulties observed in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Patients with AD, patients with MCI and healthy controls performed a written picture-naming task and a direct copy transcoding task in which phonology-to-orthography (P-O) consistency was…

In a recent study we (Greaney & Arrow, 2009) undertook an analysis of the types of spelling errors that students had made during a National Education Monitoring Project writing task (Crooks, Flockton & White, 2007). We discussed several issues related to spelling, including the value of analysing students' error-response patterns as a way…

Learning about letters is an important foundation for literacy development. Should children be taught to label letters by conventional names, such as /bi/ for "b", or by sounds, such as /b[inverted e]/? We queried parents and teachers, finding that those in the United States stress letter names with young children, whereas those in…