Associations and dissociations of reading and spelling in hungarian primary school children

Abstract While reading and spelling are closely related, their selective impairments have also been documented with distinct profiles in rapid automatized naming and phonological awareness. The current study examined the association and dissociation of reading and spelling difficulties in Hungarian, a language with complex agglutinative grammatical structure. In a large sample of Hungarian children ( N = 1908) in Grades 1 to 6, we investigated the association between reading and spelling, as well as the prevalence of isolated and combined deficits. A smaller sample ( N = 178) was reinvited to re-assess their literacy skills and their language-based cognitive abilities in rapid automatized naming, phoneme deletion, and a newly developed inflectional/derivational task. We explored how the language-based abilities explained the dissociation between reading and spelling. Further, we formed four subsamples of children to identify their cognitive profiles: poor readers/poor spellers ( N = 42), poor readers/good spellers ( N = 19), good readers/poor spellers (group, N = 26), and typically developing children ( N = 41). We observed a strong correlation between reading and spelling and similar prevalence rates for combined and isolated difficulties (6.5–7.1%). Rapid automatized naming predicted reading over and above spelling, whereas phonological and morphological skills were independent predictors of spelling over and above reading. Group comparisons showed that RAN was associated with reading deficits, phonological and morphological awareness with spelling deficits. We provide evidence that reading and spelling are overlapping but non-identical processes. We highlight the association of reading and naming speed as well as spelling and phonological and morphological awareness.