Spelling error patterns in the co-occurrence of reading and spelling difficulties among Chinese children

Abstract Reading difficulties (RD) and spelling difficulties (SD) frequently co-occur in children and are associated with persistent spelling problems. However, little is known about spelling error patterns in Chinese among children with RD, SD, or their co-occurrence (RDSD). The current study investigates spelling error patterns of Chinese RD, SD, and RDSD children, together with the cognitive-linguistic factors associated with these patterns. We recruited a total of 360 Chinese primary school students aged 8 to 11 years, with 26 meeting criteria for RD only, 32 for SD only, 25 for RDSD, and 118 typically developing children serving as controls. These children handwrote a character according to a dictation prompt. Phonological awareness (PA), rapid automatized naming (RAN), verbal short-term memory (vSTM), morphological awareness (MA), and orthographic awareness (OA) were assessed to examine cognitive-linguistic factors associated with spelling error patterns. Compared with the typical controls, all atypical groups produced more lexical-level phonological errors, such as writing a homophonic character in place of the target character, with no significant differences among the RD, SD, and RDSD groups. Across all four groups, poorer vSTM and RAN predicted lower overall spelling performance. In particular, poorer vSTM was associated with increased lexical-level phonological errors. Such increased lexical-level phonological errors may reflect difficulties in selecting the correct orthographic form among multiple homophonic alternatives in Chinese and may be associated with deficits in the retrieval and temporary maintenance of phonological information.