Spelling abilities of persons with severe speech and physical impairments

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships between patterns of spelling error and related linguistic abilities of persons with severe speech and physical impairments (SSPIs) and persons with typical abilities. Four persons with SSPIs in age from 9–23 were given a variety of linguistic and spelling assessment tasks. The linguistic tasks included measures of phonemic awareness, orthographic awareness, and morphological awareness. The spelling measures included one standardized spelling assessment to determine the participants' spelling-age, and one computerized assessment to determine patterns of spelling error. The participants with SSPIs were matched to persons with typical abilities by overall spelling-age. The use of spelling-age matches provided a way to examine differences in patterns of spelling error and underlying causes of spelling error when overall ability was equal.; Performance of the spelling-age matched pairs was comparable across most of the linguistic tasks. Analysis of the participants' performance on the computerized spelling assessment, however, showed different patterns of error and different underlying causes of error for three of the matched pairs. The participants with SSPIs evidenced most of their errors due to phonemic awareness difficulties. The participants with typical abilities evidenced most of their errors due to orthographic errors. Additionally, descriptive information across the participants with SSPIs revealed differences between the highest level speller and the other participants.