Ten Reasons Why It Is Difficult for a Person with Dyslexia to Spell Correctly

Spelling with dyslexia is not an easy play:

1)  It is difficult for a person with dyslexia to break words into phonemes/discrete sounds.

2)  The more phonemes/discrete sounds a word possesses, the bigger the challenge of deconstructing a word correctly to its phonemes.

3)  It is more difficult for a person with dyslexia to deconstruct the “middle” phonemes of a word, rather than the first and last phonemes.

4)  It is difficult for a person with dyslexia to associate sounds to letters that make up the sound.

5)  People with dyslexia tend to reverse letters in words (e.g. “on” instead of “no”).

6)  People with dyslexia tend to confuse letters that are visually similar (e.g. “bad” instead of “dad”).

7) People with dyslexia tend to confuse letters that sound similar. (e.g. “sity” instead of “city”).

8 ) People with dyslexia do not have strong visual memory for spelling. For example they will not be able to distinguish from memory the correct spelling of the word of “meet” versus the word “meat”.

9) People with dyslexia have difficulty to gain meaning from text.

10) Regular spell checkers are not “optimized” to understand and correct the spelling of a dyslexic.

For a solution, look at Ghotit Real Writer and Reader specifically designed for those with Dyslexia and Dysgraphia.

Seeing Your Dyslexic Child’s Writing For The First Time

Millions of kids have recently started going to school worldwide, about 10% of them suffering from dyslexia.

As the year unfolds, some parents of first and second graders will see for the first time the written text that their son or daughter has just written, and will ask themselves “ What is this? What gibberish has my son or daughter produced?”

For some of these parents this will be the first indication of their child’s writing disability, and their initiation as dyslexic parents…

As a lifelong dyslexic and a dyslexia advocate, I would like to provide these parents my non-scientific definition of  “dyslexia spelling” – spelling produced by dyslexics…

Dyslexia Spelling = Phonetic Spelling + Creative Spelling

What is Phonetic Spelling?

When you’re dictating a word and tell your son or daughter that he should write what he hears, a child, including a dyslexic, will attempt to map the sounds in the words to the sounds of the letters.

However, English is not a phonetic language. There are a very large number of English words where there is a gap between how the word sounds and how the word is actually spelled. Not to mention, there are many times multiple correct phonetic options to a sound (for example: k , c, ck, and qu all sound about the same)…

What is Creative Spelling?

Given that English spelling is not phonetic, and per each sound may have several spelling options, a lot of correct English spelling is dependent on the visual memory of a written word. If you have good visual memory of words, you will be able to spell a word correctly simply by writing it down, and from memory deciding if this is the correct spelling.

But people with dyslexia, have very poor and consistent visual memory of spelled words, and therefore can hardly rely on their visual memory of words.  (see my example of how I spell the word “unfortunately” in a previous Ghotit Post – My Dyslexia and Phonological Processing.)

Not to mention that dyslexics sometimes simply confuse the direction of letters, and though they meant to write the letter “b” actually end up writing the letter “d”…

I term all the above spelling challenges as “creative spelling”. It is “creative” in the sense, that given that a person simply has no idea of how to spell correctly certain syllables of a word, he creatively makes them up as he writes. And each time he “creates” a word’s spelling, it usually ends up as a different spelling creation.

Can a regular spell checker correct dyslexia spelling?

If English was a phonetic language, then regular spell checkers who have implemented phonetic spelling rules would probably provide some value for dyslexics with poor visual spelling memory…

However, English is not a phonetic language, and therefore the “creative spelling” of a person with dyslexia must be taken into account in a spell checker. However the “creative” spelling of a dyslexic is basically “noise” and therefore any computerized program, such as a regular spell checker, that tries to correct a single word at a time (and not based on the context of the sentence) is doomed to fail… That is why Microsoft spell checker many times simply fails to correct a heavily misspelled word written by a dyslexic.

Context-based spell-checkers for dyslexia spelling

Here is where benefits of a context spell checker such as Ghotit’s Contextual Spell Checker come to play. Context-based spell checkers not analyze directly the “creative spelling” of each word written by a dyslexic, but rather based on the context of what was written, intelligently offers corrections, predicting what was actually intended to be written.

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How The Brain of a Person with Dyslexia Works Differently

I recently came across a short video that provides a simple description of how the brain of a person with dyslexia works differently. I was impressed with the simplicity of the explanation. Here is a short recap.

3 Key Areas of the in the left side of the Brain that work simultaneously:

1) Phoneme Recognizer: Area used to sounding words out loud in our brain and breaking down words to similar sounds, known as phonemes (Example: the sound of the letter “T”).

2) Word Analyzer: Area used for analyzing words even more, analyzing together word syllables and phonemes (Example: the sound of “Ti” and “ger”)

3) Word Detector: Area responsible for detecting word forms, allowing to instantly recognize words without having to sound them out

People with Dyslexia, have problem to get access to both the Word Analyzer and the Word Detector. This may cause them to compensate and rely more heavily on sounding out words. Dyslexics may compensate by using the right side of the brain that takes visual cues from story pictures  to decipher words.

Here is a link to my previous Ghotit Blog My Dyslexia and Phonological Processing

And for a relieve, look at Ghotit Real Writer and Reader designed for those with Dyslexia and Dysgraphia.

My Dyslexia and Phonological Processing

First of all I will begin with a short explanation what is Phonological Processing and how it is related to dyslexics.

Phonological processing is the ability to see or hear a word, break it down to discrete sounds, and then associate each sound with letter/s that make up the word. The reason Phonological Processing is related to dyslexics, is because there is a wide consensus that dyslexia stems from a deficit in phonological processing. Good phonological processing seems to be key for strong reading and writing abilities, therefore our weak phonological processing abilities make us poor readers and writers…

So, now what I would like to relay to you is how my phonological processing is performed. It is not that I completely can not break up a word to sounds. But usually, I am able to perform it only to the first and last sounds of the word. So for example the word “unfortunately”, I can translate the sound of the beginning of the word to “un” and also the sound of the end of the word to “ly” but I just can not perform the same processing to all the middle sounds. And then I just have to try and from my visual memory try and remember the picture of the missing letters. But my “visual” memory catalogue isn’t that great so I end up spelling the word “unfortunately” something like “unforchently“.

I can not say also that I am consistent with my spelling errors. Since as I said many times I can not complete the spelling of the word from either the sound processing or from my visual memory, so I simply guess. And at different times I may “guess” different results to the spelling of the same words… so here my lack of consistency comes to play… Here is my try to write again the word “unfortunately”: “unforvently” and again, “unfocantly”.
So as you see I tried 3 times to spell the word “unfortunately” and got 3 different results, none of which regular spellcheckers could offer the correct spelling…

Spelling errors examples

Anyway, this is a blog about my personal phonological processing. If you are dyslexic, it would be interesting to hear how do you perform your “phonological processing”?

And for a solution, look at Ghotit Real Writer and Reader designed for those with Dyslexia and Dysgraphia.