Niolaki, Georgia; (2013) Processes involved in spelling in bilingual and monolingual English- and Greek-speaking children with typical and atypical spelling performance. Doctoral thesis , UNSPECIFIED.

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Abstract

Studies carried out investigated predictors of spelling and reading in monolingual and bilingual Greek and English school children attending Years 2 to 6. Studies 1, 2 and 3 investigated underlying factors in spelling of typically developing children, monolingual and bilingual. The findings of Study 1 support the notion that spelling is a multifaceted process integrating phonological, morphological, semantic and orthographic skill (Frith 1980). The aim in Study 2 was to narrow the focus on the variables found to be most strongly associated with lexical and sublexical processes for spelling and to investigate language transfer effects. Factors associated with spelling in English of bilingual children with more or less experience with Greek were examined. Children with stronger Greek literacy skill showed more influence of phonological processes than those with weak Greek literacy skills. In Study 3, three variables were investigated in relation to the single word spelling performance of a new sample of Greek and English monolingual and bilingual children. These were phonological ability (associated with sublexical processes), and visual memory and letter report (both associated with lexical processes). The findings from Studies 1, 2 and 3 indicated that, despite the difference in transparency between Greek and English, lexical processes seem to play a more important role in spelling for monolingual children than phonologically-based processes with increasing age. In Study 4 case studies of monolingual and multilingual English- and Greek-speaking children with spelling and reading difficulty are presented. Following identification of the deficit in each case, training was conducted that targeted lexical or sublexical processes. This study aimed to further test hypotheses regarding causal relationships among cognitive processes (Nickels, Kohnen, & Biedermann, 2010). The findings support the effectiveness of theoretically based targeted training programmes for literacy difficulties (cf. Brunsdon, Coltheart, & Nickels, 2005) and the usefulness of Dual Route models of spelling for identifying the underlying deficit.

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