PURPOSE: The aim of this study was to verify whether children with poor writing performances make more orthographic mistakes than children of the same school grade with average performances, and what are the most frequent types of orthographic mistakes. METHODS: Twenty-four second grade children from a public school were individually analyzed in this study. The test used was the writing subtest of the School Performance Test, which is composed by 34 words that are dictated to the students. RESULTS: Students with lower performances had significantly more orthographic mistakes than the group of children with average writing performances. The mistakes that were statistically different between children of the two groups were: hypercorrection mistakes, difficulties with nasal markers, irregular phonographemic relation, syllable omission, and letter changes. There was also a strongly negative correlation between orthographic mistakes and writing performance. CONCLUSION: The results showed that the better the writing performance, the lesser the orthographic mistakes made by the subjects. The most frequent mistakes made by children with poor writing skills were: irregular phonographemic relation, syllable omission, difficulties with nasal markers, hypercorrection errors and letter changes. These types of mistakes were different from the average student; however, the orthographic performance tends to improve with the improvement of the children's learning capacity.
Child language; Language development; Education; Learning disorders; Language arts; Education, primary and secondary
