Word Reading and Word Writing Development of First Graders with and without Developmental Dyslexia: Considering Meaning Accessibility

Objectives: This study investigated the developmental characteristics of word reading and word writing abilities in developmental dyslexia comparing to typical development. Methods: Two evaluations were conducted individually at the end of each semester for first graders with and without developmental dyslexia, 30 students in each group. After reading and writing 14 two-syllable words considering meaning accessibility, each student’s performance was analyzed and compared by grapheme units. Results: Typically developing students (TD) already demonstrated high performance in meaning word reading and writing as well as non-word reading at the end of the first semester while developmental dyslexic students showed significant improvement at the end of the second semester, but performance remained lower compared to TD students. In non-word writing, both groups showed developmental progress from the end of the first semester to the end of the second semester. However, the developmental gap between the two groups persisted. Conclusion: Despite providing 20-30 intervention sessions, developmental dyslexic students showed consistently lower performance in word reading and writing tasks compared to TD students. The results of this study suggest the urgent need for systematic and individualized intervention support at a higher frequency. The low performance in the non-word task suggests that developmental dyslexic students still have limited ability in phoneme-grapheme mapping through the non-lexical route for phoneme-grapheme correspondent words, highlighting the importance of evaluating tasks that consider meaning. Given that the dyslexic first graders developmental pattern is parallel to the TD students in non-word writing, Korean first graders seem to be actively developing spelling and transcription skills.