Author(s)

Georgia Andreou, Julie Baseki

Department of Special Education, University of Thessaly, Thessaly, Greece.

The aim of our study was to examine the phonological and spelling errors made by dyslexic and non-dyslexic children in two different languages, one (Greek, L1) much more transparent than the other (English, L2). For these purposes, our subjects (poor spellers officially diagnosed as dyslexics) composed two picture elicited narratives, one in Greek and one in English with the aid of Script Log, an online recording tool for experimental research on the process of writing. Our results showed that dyslexics generally made statistically significant (p < 0.05) more mistakes in both languages in comparison to non-dyslexics and statistically significant more phonological mistakes in English than in Greek. In addition, dyslexics made a great number of spelling mistakes in both languages, though of different nature depending on the language in which they occurred. Thus, the dyslexics in our study presented different error profiles in English and in Greek and implications are made that instruction methods should be language specific.

Dyslexia; Poor Spelling Skills; Transparent Language; Language Learning

Andreou, G. & Baseki, J. (2012). Phonological and Spelling Mistakes among Dyslexic and Non-Dyslexic Children Learning Two Different Languages: Greek vs English. Psychology, 3, 595-600. doi: 10.4236/psych.2012.38089.