Phonological awareness and spelling in normal children and dyslexics: the case of initial consonant clusters

We investigated phonological awareness and spelling skills among normal readers and spellers in Grades 1 and 2 and among dyslexics who scored at the same level as the normals on a standardized spelling test. Both normal children and dyslexics had difficulty with consonants in word-initial clusters in a phoneme recognition task and a phoneme deletion task. Also, both groups of children had trouble producing legal spellings of syllables with initial clusters, sometimes failing to represent the second consonants of the clusters. The dyslexics' phonological awareness and spelling skills were poorer than those of the younger normal children, but the two groups showed similar patterns of performance.