Copying skills in children with and without dyslexia and their relationship with spelling

The copying task is one of the most frequently used writing activities in children’s school life. It is a complex task that requires managing many cognitive processes in parallel. In addition to the reading and writing systems, copying involves memory, visual and attentional skills. However, despite the importance of copying in many situations, little is known about children’s copying skills. Moreover, while children with dyslexia are known to present difficulties in several of the processes involved in copying, it is not clear whether they exhibit specific difficulties when copying. This doctoral dissertation seeks to better understand the copying skills of children with and without dyslexia during their reading and writing development. More specifically, the first objective was to investigate the typical development of copying skills in the early primary years and their relationship with spelling skills (Objective 1). The second objective was to provide new insights regarding the copying difficulties of children with dyslexia (Objective 2). These objectives were addressed through five experimental studies conducted in samples of French-speaking children. In each experiment, the different components of copying (i.e., spelling, handwriting, and gaze lifts) were measured simultaneously to get a complete picture of children's copying skills. Overall, our findings demonstrated a considerable evolution in all copying components between Grade 1 and Grade 3 and highlighted the relationship between copying and spelling skills. Indeed, our results revealed the predictive weight of some copying components (handwriting quality and number of gaze lifts) in Grade 1 on sentence spelling accuracy in Grade 3. Moreover, our results suggested that explicit copying training can improve children’s copying and spelling skills. Regarding children with dyslexia, our findings highlighted the presence of copying difficulties in our samples of children with dyslexia in both far-point and near-point copying tasks. While producing more gaze lifts and using different copying strategies, children with dyslexia also made more spelling errors than their same-age peers. By gaining a better understanding of copying skills and their relationships with spelling, the results of this research project provided interesting avenues for both research and educational practices.