Vowel duration spelling in children with developmental language disorder: More errors, but affected by similar cues

Relatively little is known about the specific characteristics of the spelling abilities of children with developmental language disorder (DLD). This concerns knowledge about spelling patterns and the item characteristics contributing to spelling performance. It has been found that vowel duration spelling in multisyllabic words is challenging for typically developing (TD) children and that this performance is influenced by implicit cues, including semantic familiarity, orthographic frequency, and morphology. We investigated outcomes on long and short vowel duration spelling in Dutch and the potential impact of implicit cues in Dutch Grade 5 children with DLD (n = 74). We did so by comparing spelling dictation outcomes of this group of children to that of Grade 3 TD children (n = 47) and Grade 5 TD children (n = 63). The dictation task consisted of items differing in semantic familiarity, orthographic frequency, and morphology. We found that children with DLD made more errors on long and short vowel duration patterns than both TD peers and younger TD children, indicating severe difficulties. The influence of implicit cues was similar for children with DLD and younger TD children, though results varied slightly per pattern: In the consonant doubling pattern, morphology affected the spelling performance of younger TD children, but not that of children with DLD, whereas morphology affected the performance of all groups in vowel degemination. Semantic familiarity also affected the spelling accuracy of children with and without DLD, while frequency did not. The contributions of semantic familiarity and morphology can help shape spelling instruction.