$ $ & This article considers the differences between good and poor spellers. The article is organized into four basic sections that consider the factors involved in learning to spell and the relationship between reading and spelling, spelling ability in good and poor readers, the good reader–poor speller paradox, and individual differences in good and poor spellers. The major conclusion reached...

OBJECTIVE To compare the spelling ability of schoolchildren from the fourth to sixth grades of the elementary schools in the private and public schools of Bauru, São Paulo, and to verify whether errors are overcome as studies progress and the hierarchy of errors as to how often they occur. METHODS A dictation was applied to 384 schoolchildren: 206 from the private schools: 74 were at the four...

An overview of the goals of English orthography counters the misconception that its spelling is chaotic and unprincipled. Direct representation of the speaker’s phonemes is not its only goal. But even the sound-to-letter correspondences are not as inconsistent as widely believed. A survey of first-grade text vocabulary shows that spelling consistency is increased significantly if one takes into...

This study examined the effect of dialect variation on children’s spelling by using devoicing of final /d/ in African American Vernacular English (AAVE) as a test case. In line with the linguistic interference hypothesis, African American 6-year-olds were significantly poorer at spelling the final d of words such as salad than non-African American students after their spelling performance on ot...

This paper introduces an overview of Chinese Spelling Check task at SIGHAN Bake-off 2013. We describe all aspects of the task for Chinese spelling check, consisting of task description, data preparation, performance metrics, and evaluation results. This bake-off contains two subtasks, i.e., error detection and error correction. We evaluate the systems that can automatically point out the spelli...

The purpose of this study was to document the impact of an instructional approach, Word Study, on adults’ spelling and reading. Forty-nine adults enrolled in ESL classes at a community-based site in the United States from January through May and were tested on the Comprehensive Adult Student Assessment System, the Elementary Spelling Inventory and the Developmental Spelling Analysis. This study...

“Textisms” are semi-standardized abbreviations and conventions uses in SMS text messaging. Students in the fourth and fifth grades (N = 136) were exposed to words on a spelling list as correctly-spelled words, incorrectly-spelled words, or “textisms” to determine whether short term exposure to “textisms” decreased spelling performance for elementary aged children. Multivariate ANOVA found expos...

There has been less research on how children learn to spell than on how they learn to read, but a good deal is now known about spelling development. This article reviews studies of normative development, beginning with children’s early scribbles and proceeding to prephonological spelling involving letters, phonologically influenced invented spelling, and more advanced spelling. Most of the stud...

To be able to use existing natural language processing tools for analysing historical text, an important preprocessing step is spelling normalisation, converting the original spelling to present-day spelling, before applying tools such as taggers and parsers. In this paper, we compare a probablistic, language-independent approach to spelling normalisation based on statistical machine translatio...