Spelling development in deaf and hearing children: Evidence for use of morpho-phonological regularities in French

This study investigated the processes that deaf school children use for spelling. Hearing and deaf spellers of two age groups spelled three types of words differing in orthographic transparency (Regular, Morphological and Opaque words). In all groups, words that could be spelled on the basis of phoneme-grapheme knowledge (Regular words) were easier than words that could be spelled only on the basis of lexical orthographic information (Opaque words). Words in which spelling can be derived from morphological information were easier than Opaque words for older deaf and hearing subjects but not for younger subjects. In deaf children, use of phoneme-grapheme knowledge seems to develop with age, but only in those individuals who had intelligible speech. The presence of systematic misspellings indicates that the hearing-impaired youngsters rely upon inaccurate speech representations they derived mainly form lip-reading. The findings thus suggest that deaf subjects's spelling is based on an exploitation of the linguistic regularities represented in the French alphabetic orthography, but that this exploitation is limited by the vagueness of their representations of oral language. These findings are discussed in the light of current developmental models of spelling acquisition.