Unexpectedly poor spelling and phonological-processing skill

Abstract

This study investigated the phonological skills of university students who were unexpectedly poor spellers relative to their word reading accuracy. Compared with good spellers, unexpectedly poor spellers showed no deficits in phonological memory, selection of appropriate graphemes for phonemes in word misspellings and nonword spellings, and phoneme awareness. In contrast, poor readers-poor spellers performed worse than the other groups at all but the last of these tasks. Although unexpectedly poor spellers misread nonwords more often than good spellers and took longer to begin pronouncing long, difficult-to-spell words, they took no longer to begin pronouncing shorter words and the names of ..