Studies on spelling in the context of dyslexia: a literature review

ABSTRACT This paper aimed at reviewing the literature related to national and international research on spelling difficulties by dyslexics and identifying the intervention approaches performed with regard to this topic. An integrative review of the literature was carried out in order to answer the question: considering the domain of the orthography, one of the challenges frequently faced by dyslexics, how are studies on the relationship between dyslexia and spelling characterized? The research was carried out in PubMed platform, Scopus database and Portal de Periódicos CAPES/MEC. To search the articles, the following descriptors were used: "dislexia" or "dyslexia" with the free terms "ortografia" or "spelling". One aspect should be highlighted: some works indicate that difficulties in the spelling performance by dyslexics are not exclusively due to phonological processing failures - they are also secondary to alterations in orthographic processing. A challenge faced by dyslexics is to retain phonological information to use in writing new orthographic forms. Researchers suggest that intervention strategies include phonological, orthographic and lexical activities. It is observed that few studies have analyzed the difficulties that dyslexics face when dealing with new words, as well as writing, correctly, frequently used words in their own language.