Orthographic Processing Skills Flashcards

A student struggles specifically with homophones (e.g., writing 'there' for 'their'). This error pattern reflects a deficit in:

Answer: Orthographic differentiation of words with identical pronunciations

Confusing homophones demonstrates an inability to maintain distinct orthographic representations for words that sound the same, a core orthographic processing challenge.

Which characteristic of English orthography makes it more demanding than shallow orthographies like Spanish or Finnish?

Answer: English has many irregular spellings where sound-letter correspondence is inconsistent

English's deep orthography contains many words whose spellings cannot be reliably derived from pronunciation alone, increasing the demands on orthographic memory.

A WIAT evaluator notes a student correctly reads 'sign' aloud but spells it 'sine.' Which process is intact and which is impaired?

Answer: Orthographic input (reading recognition) is intact; orthographic output (spelling retrieval) is impaired

Correct reading of 'sign' shows the visual pattern is recognized, but the spelling error reveals that the complete stored representation cannot be fully retrieved for production.

Which brain region is most consistently implicated in orthographic word-form storage?

Answer: The visual word form area in the left occipito-temporal cortex

The left occipito-temporal region, often called the visual word form area or 'letterbox area,' is specialized for storing and rapidly recognizing whole-word orthographic patterns.

When interpreting WIAT results, a pattern of average reading comprehension but below-average spelling most likely indicates:

Answer: Selective orthographic output deficit with compensatory comprehension strategies

Good comprehension with poor spelling suggests the student can extract meaning from text but lacks accurate orthographic output representations needed for correct spelling.

According to Frith's stage model of literacy development, the stage at which children begin storing whole-word orthographic representations is called the:

Answer: Orthographic stage

In Frith's model, the orthographic stage is when readers move beyond sequential letter-by-letter decoding to recognize whole words as visual units stored in memory.

A student excels at spelling phonetically regular words (e.g., 'stamp,' 'blend') but struggles with irregular high-frequency words (e.g., 'colonel,' 'Wednesday'). This profile best indicates:

Answer: Strong phonological skills with weak orthographic lexicon for irregular words

Success with phonetically regular words shows intact phonological decoding, while failure on irregular words reveals an orthographic lexicon that lacks accurate representations for words that cannot be spelled by sound alone.