Phonology, decoding, and lexical compensation in vowel spelling errors made by children with dyslexia

A descriptive study of vowel spelling errors made by children first diagnosed with dyslexia (n = 79) revealed that phonological errors, such as bet for bat, outnumbered orthographic errors, such as bate for bait. These errors were more frequent in nonwords than words, suggesting that lexical context helps with vowel spelling. In a second study, children with dyslexia (n = 14) performed identically to ability matched normally developing but younger children in a task that measured the ability to identify a spoken target vowel among similarly articulated items. These findings suggest that the high incidence of vowel substitution errors seen in descriptive studies of spelling do indicate difficulty in phoneme perception for dyslexic spellers but difficulty is appropriate for their level of literacy development but not for their age or grade in school.