Stability of Deficits in Reading Fluency and/or Spelling

Kristina Moll; Melanie Gangl; Chiara Banfi; Gerd Schulte-Körne; Karin Landerl

doi:10.1080/10888438.2019.1659277

Stability of Deficits in Reading Fluency and/or Spelling

Sci Stud Read. 2019 Sep 2;24(3):241-251. doi: 10.1080/10888438.2019.1659277. eCollection 2020.

Authors

Kristina Moll¹, Melanie Gangl², Chiara Banfi², Gerd Schulte-Körne¹, Karin Landerl^{3

2}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Psychosomatics, and Psychotherapy, Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Munich, Germany.
² Institute of Psychology, University of Graz, Austria.
³ Department of Cognitive Science, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW.

Abstract

Deficits in reading fluency and in spelling can dissociate during development, resulting in groups with reading deficit only (RD), spelling deficit only (SD) and combined reading and spelling deficit (RSD). The current study investigated the one-to-two-year longitudinal stability of these subgroups in 167 German-speaking children. Reading fluency deficits (irrespective of spelling skills) were stable over time, while spelling deficits were stable in the RSD-group but not in the SD-group. Lower stability in the SD-group resulted from the fact that many children improved their spelling skills over time. Improvement in spelling was associated with good performance in phoneme awareness together with intact RAN and decoding skills.

Grants and funding

This research was supported by grants from the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, grant no. MO 2569/2-1) and the Austrian Science Fund (FWF, grant no. I 1658-G22).