WIAT Orthographic Processing Skills 3 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: A student reads fluently but scores poorly on a WIAT spelling subtest. The most likely explanation is:
- Phonological awareness is stronger than orthographic output skills (Correct answer)
- Orthographic input and output processes are always correlated
- Reading fluency deficits mask underlying spelling strengths
- Rapid naming speed accounts for the discrepancy
Correct answer: Phonological awareness is stronger than orthographic output skills
Reading can rely on partial orthographic cues and context, while accurate spelling demands complete retrieval of stored letter sequences, so a dissociation is possible.
Question 2: Which of the following best describes an 'orthographic lexicon'?
- A mental store of word meanings and their syntactic roles
- A stored inventory of the visual-letter patterns of known words (Correct answer)
- A phoneme-to-grapheme conversion rule system
- A list of morphemic units and their semantic contributions
Correct answer: A stored inventory of the visual-letter patterns of known words
The orthographic lexicon is the component of the language system that holds memorized visual representations of whole-word spellings.
Question 3: When a student misspells 'separate' as 'seperate,' this error most likely reflects:
- A phonological awareness deficit
- Failure to store the correct vowel pattern orthographically (Correct answer)
- A morphological processing error
- Deficient rapid automatized naming
Correct answer: Failure to store the correct vowel pattern orthographically
Both vowels sound similar in speech, so the error reflects an incomplete orthographic representation rather than a phonological confusion.
Question 4: On a pseudoword spelling task, a student who scores poorly but performs well spelling real words likely has:
- Strong phonological recoding with weak orthographic knowledge
- Weak phonological recoding with strong orthographic knowledge (Correct answer)
- Deficits in both phonological and orthographic systems
- Superior morphological skills masking phonological deficits
Correct answer: Weak phonological recoding with strong orthographic knowledge
Pseudoword spelling demands phonological recoding because no stored orthographic form exists, so poor pseudoword performance with intact real-word spelling indicates reliance on the orthographic lexicon.
Question 5: The WIAT assesses orthographic processing partly through tasks that require a student to identify:
- The number of syllables in a spoken word
- The correctly spelled word among foils that are phonetically similar (Correct answer)
- The fastest spoken word in a list
- The most meaningful morpheme in a compound word
Correct answer: The correctly spelled word among foils that are phonetically similar
Choosing the correctly spelled word from phonetically equivalent alternatives measures the quality of the stored orthographic representation.
Question 6: A child spells 'station' as 'stashun.' This type of error is best described as:
- Orthographic but not phonological
- Phonologically plausible but orthographically incorrect (Correct answer)
- Morphologically based
- Random or perseverative
Correct answer: Phonologically plausible but orthographically incorrect
'Stashun' accurately represents the sounds of the word but does not reflect knowledge of the conventional spelling patterns, indicating an orthographic deficit.
Question 7: Which factor most strongly predicts growth in orthographic knowledge over the elementary school years?
- Vocabulary breadth
- Amount of print exposure through reading (Correct answer)
- Working memory capacity
- Phonemic awareness at kindergarten entry
Correct answer: Amount of print exposure through reading
Extensive reading provides repeated encounters with written words that gradually consolidate orthographic representations in long-term memory.
WIAT Orthographic Processing Skills 3
A student reads fluently but scores poorly on a WIAT spelling subtest.
The most likely explanation is: