Spelling Errors of Dyslexic Children in Bosnian Cyrillic and Latin Script

In Bosnia and Herzegovina, two scripts are in use, which gave us the possibility to investigate the influence of visual characteristics of scripts on the manifestation of spelling errors in persons with dyslexia. The purpose of this study was to explore the nature of spelling errors made by children with dyslexia in two different scripts of the single language, Latin and Cyrillic. The most frequent spelling errors in reading in both scripts on most tasks were phonological errors. Although Bosnian is a language with rich morphological forms, children with dyslexia did not show a lack of knowledge of the grammatical rules. On the task specifically designed to include orthographic rules, phonological errors were the most prominent in Latin, while orthographic errors were the most frequent in Cyrillic. On these tasks, dyslexics who wrote in Latin made more errors than dyslexics who wrote in Cyrillic. The results lead us to the conclusion that spelling in Latin is harder than spelling in Cyrillic for dyslexic children. Representations of the visual forms of graphemes are an important aspect of spelling. These findings highlight the implications of visual characteristics of graphemes for learning to spell, particularly in children with dyslexia.