DYSGRAPHIA: DEVELOPMENTAL
Delayed acquisition of writing skills and/or the development of writing which deviates markedly from what is generally observed in children. Dysgraphia is often associated with dyslexia, and there may be parallels in the symptoms presented. Surface dyslexics often have severe problems with irregular spellings. Phonological dyslexics can learn to spell on a whole-word basis, though they may insert incorrect letters or produce letters in the wrong order. They cannot spell non words or new words, just as they cannot read them. The handwriting of both types of dyslexic is usually poor.
It has been suggested that normal writing acquisition in English proceeds through three stages: imitative, phonological and ortho graphic. Dysgraphia may emerge at the phonological stage. Here, one possible explanation is that the child is unable to segment the speech signal into phonemes; another is that it is unable to match phonemes to graphemes. Either way, the child fails to develop an adequate grapho-phonological system, and thus cannot guess the spellings of words from their spoken forms. Alternatively, dysgraphia may emerge at the orthographic stage, when a child fails to move on from phonological spellings to irregular whole-word ones.
In addition to the symptoms described, there may be problems of peripheral dysgraphia involving the formation of letters. A classic example is the substitution of b for p. These indications may reflect difficulty in analysing letter shapes visually, in storing letter shapes in the mind or in linking the execution of a letter to its stored representation.
See also: Disorder, Dyslexia: developmental
Further reading: Ellis (1993); Harris and Coltheart (1986)
