Having FAITH in reading and spelling. An Optimality Theoretic study of Dutch children with poor reading skills.

Abstract

This thesis investigated reading and spelling errors in “affected” and “unaffected” children at-risk of dyslexia (children with a least one parent with literacy problems).Two goals were attempted to be achieved. Firth, a theoretical model within the framework of Optimality Theory (McCarthy & Prince, 1993, Prince & Smolensky, 1993, Kager, 1999) was proposed to account for reading and writing in Dutch. Given the assumption that reading and spelling relies on the pronunciation (Wester, 1985), a correspondence relation between the phonetic surface form and the graphemic surface form is assumed by means of the faithfulness constraint PG-Identity (Phoneme – Grapheme). A high ranking of this constraint type renders a complete one-to-one mapping between phonemes and graphemes. In normal development of reading and writing in Dutch, the PG-constraint needs to be demoted, since Dutch is a semi-transparent language (it does not fully rely on a complete one-toone mapping). The analysis of the data revealed that “affected” at-risk children have difficulties with this process; this is mainly supported by errors in spelling with regard to long and short vowels (i.e. alternations), and final devoicing. Children who were classified as “unaffected” at-risk children (children without literacy problems according to literacy measurements), appeared to resemble the control group (children without a familial history of dyslexia) in terms of reading speed, however, they seemed to embody a similar error behavior as the “affected” group in reading and spelling (but to a less severe extent). The results of this study showed that no real phonological errors surfaced in literacy skills, instead, a deviating phoneme to grapheme conversion is found. This finding gives more insight into the Phonological Deficit Hypothesis; mapping phonemes onto graphemes is difficult for poor readers. Finally, the theoretical model provided linguistic support for this assumption by means of a description of the grammar of children with poor literacy skills.