Spell why in french

At the end of the 5 min, children finished their last sentence and put their pens down. The proportion of words spelled correctly in this task has good construct validity 0.

Figures 1 , 2 provide an example of production from a TD French and an English participant respectively. Figure 1. Example of a text produced by a French child aged 10 years 11 months year 5. Figure 2. Example of a text produced by an English child aged 10 years 11 months year 6. All children were administered the full test as a group, in order to obtain their standard score.

A subset of the words commonly misspelled by children in both languages was then selected for further analysis. Words were chosen to be representative of the phonological, orthographic, morphological and semantic conventions of written French and English.

Words were also matched across languages on number of letters, phonemes, and as much as possible on frequency counts. Table 3 provides a list of the 12 words chosen in each language. Table 3. Characteristics of the words chosen from the parallel WIAT-spelling tasks. Both experimental tasks were administered in small groups of up to eight children, in one min session.

For the texts, productivity was measured in number of words produced by each child, excluding proper nouns and illegible words. For both tasks, accuracy was measured by dividing the number of words correctly spelled by the number of words attempted. After measuring accuracy in the texts and dictated words, a qualitative coding of the spelling errors was conducted by the first author and by two trained independent raters who were native speakers of each language. The framework for spelling error analysis was adapted from Apel and Masterson Spelling errors were classified as either phonological, orthographic, morphological or semantic in nature, as detailed in Table 4.

Subcategories were attributed to specific error types within these broad categories, for a fine-grained characterization of spelling profiles in children with DLD, as shown in Table 4.

Rate of errors in each category is given in number of errors per word produced, in order to account for individual differences in productivity. Table 4. Coding of spelling errors, adapted from Apel and Masterson Productivity and accuracy results are presented first, followed by the qualitative analysis of the spelling errors. These results are always presented for the language comparison first French vs. English , and then for the subgroup comparisons CA vs.

DLD vs. SA within each language. Finally, regression models to predict a subset of outcome spelling measures are presented. Robust ANOVAs and post hoc tests were run to assess language and subgroup effects on productivity and accuracy measures, in order to account for the presence of outliers and the heterogeneity of variance Mair and Wilcox, Table 5 presents the mean and standard deviation for the productivity and accuracy measures in the two tasks for our groups of interest.

Table 5. Mean and standard deviation for the spelling productivity and accuracy measures. On average, English texts were 10 words longer than the French texts. There was no difference in productivity in the word dictation task, with all children attempting all 12 words dictated. On average, English children produced a misspelling every six words of their texts, whilst the French children produced a misspelling every second word.

On average, there was a misspelling in every word attempted in both the English and the French dictated words. On average, there was a misspelling in every word attempted in the DLD and SA samples, and one misspelling every three to four words in the CA samples.

Results from the qualitative error coding were analyzed using Wilcoxon rank-sum tests, to account for the overall positive skewness and heterogeneity of variance in the data. A Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons was applied to reduce the chance of false positives.

P -values below 0. Figure 3 presents bean plots for the proportion of each error type, per language and group, in the texts and dictated words. The bean plots represent the median, data points and a bean-shape smoothed density curve verticalized , showing the non-normal distribution of the data across all error types. Results from the Wilcoxon rank-sun tests are given in turn for the language comparisons in both tasks, and for the subgroup comparisons, within each language and for both tasks.

Error types are then further broken down using the fine-grain coding scheme, for each type of error phonological, orthographic, morphological, and semantic , in order to provide a detailed profile of the types of errors made within each language and group. Figure 3. Median and distribution of the proportion of each error type, per language and group. In both languages and tasks, phonological errors consisted largely of consonant omissions especially in consonant clusters, e.

See Appendices A, B for the breakdown of error types within the phonological category. In the French texts and dictated words, orthographic errors were largely found on irregular vowel e. In the English texts, errors on unstressed e. In the dictated words, English children also produced orthographic errors on silent letters e. See Appendices C, D for the breakdown of error types within the orthographic category.

In the French texts, children produced a large number of morphological errors on tense e. The pattern was slightly different in the dictated words, where French children also produced many derivational base errors e.

In the English dictated words, in addition to inflection omissions, children with DLD and SA also produced errors with contractions e.

See Appendices E, F for the breakdown of error types within the morphological category. Note, however, that this error type was marginal in both languages in the dictated words, with error rates flooring close to zero per word attempted. In all groups, errors on grammatical homophones were also prominent e.

These errors were almost absent in English texts. In the dictated words, however, English children, especially in the DLD and SA subgroups produced some errors with grammatical homophones e. See Appendices G, H for the breakdown of error types within the semantic category. In order to control for any sampling confounds that could explain the cross-language differences observed, we ran further regression analyses. These regressions examined the following predictors: age, NVP and phonological awareness as control variables in a first step and language French vs.

English in a second step. They were run for outcome measures where significant cross-language differences were found, that is: the number of words produced in the texts where English children were more productive than French peers , the proportion of words correct in both tasks where English children were more accurate than French peers ; the rate of morphological errors in texts and dictated words and the rate of semantic errors in the texts only where French children produced more errors than their English peers ; the rate of orthographic and semantic errors in the dictated words where English children produced more errors than their French peers.

Number of words produced in the texts was the only continuous outcome with normally distributed residuals and a generalized linear model was applied using the lm function in R R Core Team, For all other measures, beta regressions for beta-distributed outcomes were applied, using the betareg function in R Cribari-Neto and Zeileis, Zero-order correlations between all variables of interest are presented in the first instance.

Table 6 presents the correlation between the control and spelling measures, for the French and the English samples separately. Non-verbal performance and phonological awareness correlated strongly with most of the spelling outcomes selected.

In English, both measures correlated strongly with the accuracy measures on both tasks, and with the rate of morphological and orthographic spelling errors in the 12 dictated words in particular.

In French, they were also strong correlates with the spelling accuracy and productivity measures in addition to age. In French, phonological awareness was a strong correlate of semantic errors in texts but did not correlate with semantic errors in the dictated words nor with morphological errors in the texts.

Stepwise regressions were run to assess the effect of language over and above age, NVP and phonological awareness, for the productivity and accuracy measures where English children performed better than French children: 1 number of words produced in the texts, 2 proportion of correct words in the texts, 3 proportion of correct words in the 12 dictated words.

These regressions are presented in Table 7. Table 7. Regression models for productivity and accuracy outcomes where English children outperformed French children. The initial model with age, NVP and phonological awareness explained a significant The addition of the language predictor in a second step explained a significant further The initial model with age, NVP and phonological awareness explained The addition of language in a second step explained a significant further The regressions confirmed language was a significant predictor of our productivity and accuracy measures of interest, over and above age, NVP and phonological awareness.

All control measures being equivalent, English students were more likely than French students to produce longer and more accurate texts, and more correct words in the dictated words. Stepwise regressions were run to assess the effect of language over and above age, NVP and phonological awareness, for the qualitative outcome measures where English children performed better than French children: 1 morphological errors in the texts, 2 morphological errors in the 12 dictated words, 3 semantic errors in the texts.

These regressions are presented in Table 8. Table 8. Regression models for qualitative outcome measures where English children outperformed French children. The initial model with age, NVP and phonological awareness explained 1. The initial model with age, NVP and phonological awareness explained 6. The addition of language in a second step explained a further The regressions confirmed language was a significant predictor of our qualitative measures of interest, over and above age, NVP and phonological awareness.

English children were less likely than French children to produce morphological and semantic errors in the texts, and morphological errors in the dictated words, regardless of age, NVP and phonological awareness levels.

Stepwise regressions were run to assess the effect of language over and above age, NVP and phonological awareness, for the qualitative outcome measures where French children performed better than English children: 1 orthographic errors in the 12 dictated words, 2 semantic errors in the 12 dictated words. The regression models for these outcome measures are presented in Table 9.

Table 9. Regression models for qualitative outcome measures where French children outperformed English children. The regressions confirmed the importance of language in explaining the proportion of semantic errors, over and above age, NVP and phonological awareness. With equivalent age, NVP scores and phonological awareness scores, French students were less likely than English students to produce semantic errors in the dictated words.

However, language was not a significant contributor to the model explaining the proportion of orthographic errors in the 12 words. The present study aimed to characterize the spelling difficulties of children with DLD at the end of primary school, in two languages of similar orthographic opacity, but contrasted for their linguistic constraints: French and English. The results point to cross-language differences in text productivity and error rates, with all French groups producing shorter and less accurate texts than their English peers overall.

They also point to qualitative differences in the locus of these errors, with more orthographic errors in the English dictation samples and more morphological errors in the French texts and dictation samples.

Nevertheless, across languages and error types, children with DLD performed in line with their SA but not CA peers, suggesting a delay in their spelling profiles commensurate with language and literacy levels. Fine-grained analysis of errors further shows language-specific constraints in the spelling of each group of children. By using a linguistic framework for the assessment of spelling errors, we were able to highlight differences in the constraints affecting spelling in French and English.

It was predicted that orthographic constraints were more likely to affect spelling performance in English, whilst morphological constraints were more likely to affect spelling performance in French.

We indeed found poorer morphological spelling scores in French as compared to English, in both tasks, but we could not quite highlight any difference in the rate of orthographic errors between the two languages, in any of the tasks, although the proportion of orthographic errors in dictation was slightly higher in English than French altogether.

This result highlights the importance of considering spelling as a multi-component skill rather than as a single construct, with lexical and sublexical constraints on the one hand, and grammatical constraints on the other Morin et al. It also emphasizes the need for several tasks to tap into these distinct mechanisms. The assessment of spelling is often limited to word-level tasks, emphasizing the influence of word properties, such as syllabic complexity, frequency and transparency, on spelling performance Wimmer and Landerl, ; Marinelli et al.

In our study, the orthographic constraints of English appeared only in the word dictation task, where children could not choose the words they spelled, whilst French morphological constraints were most evident in text production, where children had to consider the grammatical context of many words in order to spell inflections accurately. Finally, the many segmentation errors found in the French younger and DLD samples were evidenced in text production only.

To our knowledge, the present study provides the first direct comparison of word- as well as sentence-level constraints on spelling in English compared to another language. It was striking that our French sample overall produced shorter and less accurate texts than their English peers, despite English being consistently described as an outlier in terms of spelling difficulty Share, We argue that future studies of spelling development are needed, that contrast orthographies not only for orthographic consistency but also morphological richness, both derivational and inflectional see for example Desrochers et al.

The present work was motivated by a meta-analytic review of the literature on the spelling performance of children with DLD across European orthographies Joye et al. That review did not highlight any difference in the quantity of errors produced by children with DLD compared to younger typically developing children matched for language or literacy skills, but did highlight a clear lag in spelling scores compared to same-age children.

By comparing the spelling errors of these three groups of children qualitatively, we aimed to assess whether the locus of these spelling difficulties might differ in children with DLD when a more detailed analysis of their spelling errors was included. Our group comparisons did not highlight significant differences in the spelling profiles of children with DLD and younger typically developing children matched for spelling level.

Children with DLD produced errors similar to those of their younger peers, and in similar proportions, that is: segmentation errors in French texts, errors with contextual patterns and inconsistent vowel spellings in English, and a range of phonological errors in both languages. Errors with inflection omissions and contractions were also found in the English SA and DLD samples, whilst in French, morpheme substitutions were most common, and found overwhelmingly across all three groups.

It should be noted that all comparisons were run with a stringent significance threshold of 0. Visual examination of the data Figure 1 does suggest that French children with DLD might produce a slightly higher rate of phonological errors than their SA peers. It also suggests the distribution for this error type is spread toward the higher end in the English-DLD sample as compared to their SA peers. On the other hand, orthographic and morphological errors seem to be slightly higher in the younger group in both languages than both CA and DLD groups.

Considered together, these visual trends suggest a developmental pattern whereby children with DLD are delayed in their orthographic and morphological spelling, but might remain more impaired than should be expected in the phonological domain.

However, these trends are not corroborated by the numerical comparisons. The current results also provide developmental benchmarks for the assessment of spelling in a population of children with DLD in French and English middle school.

Future studies may want to characterize further the spelling profiles of French and English children in early primary and secondary school. This has been done to an extent for adolescents in previous studies Dockrell et al.

Further data are needed to test whether morphological ending errors appear in French samples later on in adolescence, and to what extent they deviate from younger peers matched for spelling level.

Future studies may also explore whether morphological ending and contraction errors in English and segmentation errors in French , as well as phonological errors in both languages , persist in adolescence, over and above what might be expected given overall spelling development. The phonological and morphological difficulties of children with DLD have often been investigated in their early oral language Leonard, One aim of the current study was to assess whether some of these oral language difficulties remain in written language, and to assess whether they could be found in languages other than English and thus test any claim for universality in atypical language development.

A few studies have found suffix omissions to be a particular feature of the spelling of children with DLD Windsor et al.

Those studies were conducted in English only, and pointed to specific difficulties with spelling - ing , plural and 3rd person -s and past tense -ed , as also observed in the oral language of English children with DLD Windsor et al. Observation of the descriptive data as shown in Appendices E, F suggests that these errors are also found overwhelmingly in our English DLD sample.

Several interpretations can be drawn from these data. Firstly, our data suggest that, if specific to the population of English children with DLD, inflection omission errors are not necessarily found in other languages, at least not in French middle school, arguing against any claim for universality of these particular error types. Secondly, our data question whether the drivers of these specific errors in English are morphological in nature.

It has been argued that phonological salience is an important factor to consider when assessing morphological omission errors in the oral language of children with DLD Parisse and Maillart, It is possible that English children with DLD continue to produce omissions of non-salient morphological markers for an extended period of time, just as they continue producing other errors with difficult phonological combinations such as consonant cluster reductions, substitutions of closely related consonants and vowels in both French and English.

Finally, our written data complements accounts of French DLD-specific errors in oral language Jakubowicz et al. In oral language, French clitic pronouns have been found to be particularly difficult for children with DLD.

This is in line with evidence from typical development suggesting phonological and non-phonological aspects of language are intricately related in the early years Hipfner-Boucher et al. It is likely that difficulties with both segmental and supra-segmental aspects of language in this population drive further difficulties with later lexical and orthographic representations Share and Shalev, We argue that a broad linguistic framework incorporating oral as well and written word forms is likely to be appropriate to assess and support the spelling development of children with DLD Apel and Masterson, Possible constraints in understanding the spelling profiles of our sample were explored with a set of control measures age, non-verbal performance and phonological awareness.

English children were more likely to obtain higher scores on these measures, but also more likely than French children to produce semantic errors in the dictated words. By contrast, French children were more likely to produce a higher proportion of morphological and semantic errors in their texts and morphological errors in the dictated words.

There was one exception to these confirmatory results: language did not predict the proportion of orthographic errors in the 12 dictated words, over and above age, NVP and phonological awareness. In this model, age was a particularly good predictor of the decrease in the proportion of orthographic errors, suggesting in both languages, continued exposure with written content improves the retention of orthographic patterns, in line with self-teaching accounts Conrad, ; Shahar-Yames and Share, Age, NVP and phonological awareness correlated with most of the spelling outcomes considered, in both languages.

However, in French, the proportion of semantic errors in the dictated words and morphological errors in the texts was not associated with age or phonological awareness. We interpret this as an indication that these errors are related to spelling skills that were still not mastered in the French older control group homophones and morphological inflections. In English, all three control measures correlated with the spelling productivity and accuracy variables and most qualitative measures.

However, semantic errors in general and morphological errors in the texts did not correlate very strongly with the predictors. This likely reflects the low rate of such errors in the English sample altogether.

Phonological skills have been related to French and English spelling in previous studies Moll et al. However, in the existing literature, spelling had been considered as a single construct. By differentiating between different component spelling skills in the present study, we also found differentiated patterns of relationships. This was rather an incidental finding as the focus of the present study was really on spelling errors. Future studies may want to further investigate the nature of the differences observed in the present study, including predictors of different components of text spelling such as morphological awareness e.

We also suggest that reading might be a better indicator of phonological skills in late primary school than an explicit measure of phonological awareness. Not all children with DLD in our sample presented with low phonological awareness scores, but a large proportion of them presented with low reading scores as shown in Table 1. Although the present study attempted to draw on a range of linguistic components in the list of words that children were given to spell, it was impossible to match our French and English list of words on all sublexical aspects critical to spelling morphological, orthographic and phonological complexity as well as frequency, number of orthographic and phonological neighbors, syllabic complexity and word length.

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