Writing skills of children with and without dyslexia: similarities and differences

Abstract

The difficulties in writing among children with dyslexia are equally severe as and certainly more persistent than those they face in reading. In the present study, we compared the performance of 22 elementary school children (3rd and 5th graders) with dyslexia and 22 typically developing children, matched on gender, age, and non-verbal intelligence, on a picture-elicited narrative task. Participants’ written samples were evaluated in terms of productivity, complexity at the sentence and text levels, punctuation and capitalization, spelling accuracy, and text organization (cohesion and coherence). Groups differed chiefly in terms of spelling accuracy and cohesion, as non- dyslexic participants performed better. Qualitative analyses of the narratives produced allowed us to compare further and gain insight into the children’s spelling and text organization abilities in each group. Coherence appeared to be the domain in which children with and without dyslexia demonstrate the greatest similarities. More specifically, all of them face difficulties in controlling the macrostructure of their narratives, namely how the contents of the pictures may be interrelated, an ability that is necessary for the construction of textual meaning. Results are discussed in relation to the limited so far research findings regarding written language production, especially concerning children with dyslexia. Also, directions of future research are indicated, along with implications for educational practice.