Unexpectedly Poor Spelling and Phonological-Processing Skill

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 corresponding pictures. The difficulty with reading nonwords and long words was thus interpreted as arising at the stage of identifying and parsing the orthographic input rather than phonological retrieval. The findings indicate that unexpectedly poor spellers of the type studied here do not have a mild phonological deficit.