WORD-PROCESSING WITH SPEECH SYNTHESIS AND WORD PREDICTION - EFFECTS ON THE DIALOGUE JOURNAL WRITING OF STUDENTS WITH LEARNING-DISABILITIES

Five students, ages 9 and 10, with learning disabilities and severe wr iting problems wrote in dialogue journals to their teacher. They used a standard word processor during baseline phases and a ward processor with speech synthesis and word prediction features during treatment ph ases. The special features had a strong effect on the legibility and s pelling of written dialogue journal entries for four of the five stude nts. During baseline, the writing of these four students ranged from 5 5% to 85% legible words and 42% to 75% correctly spelled words. All fo ur increased their percentage of both legible and correctly spelled wo rds into the 90-100% range.