Phonological Spelling Errors in the writing of Greek Dyslexic Adolescents: The need for early intervention

Phonological deficits have been repeatedly proposed as the underlying cause of Developmental Dyslexia, a specific learning difficulty in the acquisition of reading and spelling. Phonological spelling errors are investigated within the framework of Greek language, which has been characterized as a language with “transparent orthography”, in terms of learning to read. However, in the case of spelling, Greek is rather demanding. (view Protopapas and Vlachou, in press; Porpodas, 2006). In the current research we present data from 80 Greek Dyslexic Adolescents (all grades of JH) on a dictation-spelling task. The Test that was administered was the dictation-spelling text of the 6th level-subtest of the “Test Battery for the Assessment of Dyslexia in Greek (Zachos D. & Zachos, I. , 1998). The data were compared to the data of 41 dyslexic children of the 6th primary school grade and to 191 children without learning difficulties of the 6th primary school grade, and can be summarized as follows: • All the groups of dyslexic children achieved significantly low scores compared to the control groups • Dyslexic adolescents were found to have significantly lower performance comparing to the children of 6th grade • The performance of the dyslexic groups showed no particular differentiantion-amelioration, despite the age and the educational level Dyslexic Adolescents were found to have particular difficulties with the phonological demands of the task. This implies the need for an early assessment and intervention, as well as the implementation of specific diagnostic measures designed according to the particularities of Greek.