PURPOSE: To investigate how children with dyslexia use the phonographemic correspondence rule in their writing regardless of context and how they identify and analyze their writing mistakes according to the variables: frequency of occurrence of the linguistic item and school grade. METHODS: The writing errors observed on a task of dictation of high- and low-frequency words and pseudowords were analyzes and compared. Fifty-six students from 1st to 4th grades of private elementary schools were evaluated: 28 with dyslexia (research group), and 28 without writing complaints or deficits (comparison group), paired by age, gender and grade. The reasons for right and wrong answers were taped and compared. RESULTS: The statistic analysis showed that students with dyslexia performed worse than the comparison group. Moreover, there was a decrease in the number of errors with the progression of schooling, especially in high frequency words. Students with dyslexia showed more difficulty to analyze the linguistic items and recognize their correct writing. CONCLUSION: Children with dyslexia had more difficulties in writing and analyzing linguistic items of transparent orthography. The effect of lexical frequency facilitated error identification. The occurrence of errors decreased with schooling progression and varied according to linguistic item.
Dyslexia; Handwriting; Evaluation; Child language; Learning
