Spelling development and disability: The importance of linguistic factors

This article reviews the Literature an normal and impaired spelling develop ment in English. Once children begin to learn that the function of alphabet ic writing is to represent the sounds of language! they go through the proc ess of learning sound-spelling correspondences in increasingly fine detail. Continued experience with print allows children to learn about orthographi c and morphological conventions of the language. Within this general framew ork, the authors describe research that underscores the importance of fine- grained linguistic analyses of spelling performance. It is concluded that s uch an approach holds a great deal of promise for theory and practice.