Spelling in oral deaf and hearing dyslexic children: A comparison of phonologically plausible errors.

The team compared spelling mistakes in two groups of late-elementary children: deaf children who speak and children with dyslexia.

Everyone wrote the same English words. The researchers counted how many errors still sounded like the target word.

They also tested each child’s vocabulary size and how clearly strangers could understand their speech.

Both groups spelled below age level, but their errors looked different.

Deaf children made fewer “sounds-right” mistakes. For them, bigger vocabulary and clearer speech went hand-in-hand with more plausible spellings.

Children with dyslexia produced more “sounds-right” errors, and their speech clarity did not predict spelling style.

Cai et al. (2019) later showed that, in Chinese deaf readers, vocabulary still beats phonology for reading fluency. The pattern crosses languages: vocabulary is the constant, phonology is not.

Holmer et al. (2016) seemed to disagree—they found that sign-language phonological awareness helps Swedish deaf children read. The key difference is modality: Emil looked at sign phonology, while P et al. looked at spoken phonology. Both can be true; they measure different routes to print.

Peeters et al. (2009) link speech production to later reading in cerebral palsy. P et al. echo this link: when speech is hard to produce, plausible spelling suffers.

Check both vocabulary and speech intelligibility before you teach spelling to deaf speaking students. If either is weak, lean on visual word forms and meaning-based cues first. For dyslexic students, keep training phoneme-to-letter rules—they already use sound-based spelling. One quick move: have the child say the word clearly, then ask, “Does your spelling sound like the word?” If they can’t judge, switch to visual flashcards and morpheme work.