There are three kinds of difficulty that may cause a child’s written work to be incomprehensible. First, specific spelling difficulty, where some words may be so badly spelt that they are difficult to recognize. Secondly, specific writing difficulty, where the handwriting may be so untidy that it is illegible see Figure 7.3, p. 65). And, thirdly, language disorder, where the language used by the child may be so full of errors that it does not make sense. Specific spelling difficulty will be described in this chapter, specific writing difficulty in the next chapter, and language disorders will be described in Chapter 9. . . . What is specific spelling difficulty? . . . specific spelling difficulty can be defined as an unexplained, significant spelling difficulty. A significant difficulty is usually defined as a spelling age more than two standard deviations below the mean for the child’s age (see Chapter 1, p. 5 for the explanation of this term). Specific spelling difficulty is often associated with specific reading difficulty. In some children, specific spelling difficulty is an isolated problem. Although such children will have average reading ability, research studies suggest that subtle reading problems can be detected in such children on special testing. . . . How spelling is assessed . . . There are several standardized spelling tests in general use. These differ in the ways in which they test spelling. Some present the child with words that are part of his sight vocabulary, others present a wider range of words. Tests usually involve spelling from dictation. Some may also involve recognizing whether a printed word is correctly spelt or not. The psychologist will choose the test, or tests, that will provide information about the child’s spelling level, as well as about the nature of his difficulties. For example, a test that shows that a child has difficulties with spelling from dictation, but not with identifying words that are incorrectly spelt, may demonstrate particular problems with word memory. The psychologist will also try to differentiate between the different kinds of spelling errors, such as phonetic, visual, and sequential errors, which are described later in this chapter.

on grammatical spelling level. All the children were asked to perform a subject verb agreement grammatical spelling test and a written syntactic awareness test on the same sentences, as well as control measures. Results demonstrated that the children with dyslexia performed equally compared to grammatical spelling matched children in grammatical spelling, whilst they performed less well compared to children of the same age. For syntactic awareness, they were less accurate at identifying the subject of the complex sentences than spelling age matched children, even though both groups were matched in grammatical spelling. These results demonstrate that children with dyslexia face a specific deficit in written syntactic awareness. It highlights how better understanding of the spelling difficulty will better guide treatment. Keywords: dyslexia, grammatical spelling, written syntactic awareness, subject verb agreement, spelling acquisition Introduction Children with dyslexia who represent between 10 and 15% of school age children ( Vellutino et al., 2004 ) are known to have not only reading but also spelling deficits ( Maughan et al., 2009 ). Spelling deficits include phonetic spelling (phoneme to grapheme correspondences, Angelelli et al., 2004 ) lexical spelling (spelling of the words, with inconsistent mappings in opaque languages such as French; Alegria and Mousty, 1996 ) and grammatical spelling difficulties (inflexional suffixes on words, verbs, or adjectives, Egan and Pring, 2004 ). To date, few studies have evaluated the spelling difficulties of children with dyslexia and even fewer have had the objective of specifically evaluating their grammatical spelling difficulty. However, even for students with dyslexia who have access to higher education, inflectional spelling errors are still observed in text productions and in dictation tasks ( Tops et al., 2013 ). For these reasons, it is important to understand more fully the persistent difficulties encountered by chil