Ορθογραφική ακρίβεια και ορθογραφική συνέπεια στην απόδοση λεξικών και παραγωγικών μορφημάτων της ελληνικής γλώσσας από μαθητές με και χωρίς δυσκολίες στο γραπτό λόγο

The present study focused on the examination of matters related to the morphological aspect of spelling. This seems to pose great difficulties to students with or without reading and spelling difficulties. Particularly, this study attempts to examine the spelling of the base and the derived words by Greek-speaking typical achievement students and students with reading and spelling difficulties, all which attended primary school. The participants of this study were 66 fourth and sixth graders. Initially, as part of the testing, students completed a battery of pretests which evaluated their nonverbal intelligence, short-term memory and reading and spelling skills. The results of these tests led to the selection of the students that would form each group and the matching of the groups. Three research groups of participants took part in this study: an experimental group and two control groups. The experimental group consisted of 21 typical achievement sixth graders, control group I consisted of 21 sixth graders with reading and spelling difficulties and control group II comprised 24 typical achievement sixth graders. A reading/spelling level match design was employed. The experimental group was matched in terms of chronological age and intellectual level (chronological age-matched group) with control group I whereas with control group II in terms of reading, spelling and intellectual level (reading/spelling level-matched group). In addition, students were assessed on a spelling task that was designed to examine their spelling accuracy, their spelling consistency and their spelling accuracy-consistency in spelling lexical morphemes and derivational suffixes of Greek words. The experimental items in the spelling task were morphologically related word-pairs (base and derivation). To test the spelling accuracy, lexical morphemes and derivational suffixes of words were divided into 140 lexical parts. To test the spelling consistency, these lexical parts were grouped in 52 groups. The main results are as follows: as far as the correlations are concerned, apart from non-verbal intelligence, there is statistically significant indicators among all independent variables and between the independent and the dependent variables “percentage of spelling accuracy”, “percentage of spelling consistency” and “percentage of spelling accuracy and consistency” of the spelling task. Moreover, in the measurements of the spelling task, students with reading and spelling difficulties performed poorly in spelling lexical morphemes and derivational suffixes compared to their typical achievement peers. At the same time, their performance was similar to the performance of typical achievement fourth graders. In addition, the three groups had a better performance in spelling the lexical morphemes and derivational suffixes of nouns and of adjectives than of verbs. These findings confirm the profile of students with reading and spelling difficulties that has been shown in previous studies. In particular, it seems that there is a delay in the spelling skills of students with reading and spelling difficulties. This is consistent with a spelling delay hypothesis, rather than a spelling deviance hypothesis. Furthermore, the groups’ high percentages in spelling consistency allow us to claim that students use morphological strategies when they spell morphologically related words. However, typical achievement sixth graders seem to make greater use of morphological strategies, since they produce more consistent and correct spellings of the lexical morphemes and derivational suffixes compared to their peers with reading and spelling difficulties and typical achievement fourth graders. Our results suggest the use of morphological strategies, yet they do not exclude the use of other strategies which rely on memory such us memory strategies. Finally, typical achievement sixth graders scored a higher percentage in spelling accuracy compared to the other two groups. However, there were certain parts in which the students’ spellings didn’t differ. Our data show that in these parts students of the three groups scored high or low percentages of spelling accuracy. The absence of statistically significant differences between the three groups in these cases is an area of concern and highlights the role of the orthographic processing of each word.