Analysis of spelling error patterns of individuals with complex communication needs and physical impairments

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships between patterns of spelling error and related linguistic abilities of four persons with complex communication needs and physical impairments, compared to younger individuals without disabilities matched by spelling age. All participants completed a variety of spelling and linguistic tasks to determine overall spelling age, patterns of spelling errors, and abilities across phonemic, orthographic, and morphological awareness. Performance of the spelling-age matched pairs was similar across most of the phonemic, orthographic, and morphological awareness tasks. Analysis of the participants' spelling errors, however, revealed different patterns of spelling errors for three of the spelling-age matched pairs. Within these three pairs, the participants with complex communication needs and physical impairments made most of their spelling errors due to phonemic awareness difficulties, while most of the errors on the part of the participants without disabilities were due to orthographic difficulties. The results of this study lend support to the findings of previous investigations that reported difficulties among individuals with complex communication needs and physical impairments evidence when applying phonemic knowledge to literacy tasks.