Developmental dysgraphia: An overview and framework for research

ABSTRACT

Developmental deficits in the acquisition of writing skills (developmental dysgraphias) are common and have significant consequences, yet these deficits have received relatively little attention from researchers. We offer a framework for studying developmental dysgraphias (including both spelling and handwriting deficits), arguing that research should be grounded in theories describing normal cognitive writing mechanisms and the acquisition of these mechanisms. We survey the current state of knowledge concerning developmental dysgraphia, discussing potential proximal and distal causes. One conclusion emerging from this discussion is that developmental writing deficits are diverse in their manifestations and causes. We suggest an agenda for research on developmental dysgraphia, and suggest that pursuing this agenda may contribute not only to a better understanding of developmental writing impairment, but also to a better understanding of normal writing mechanisms and their acquisition. Finally, we provide a brief introduction to the subsequent articles in this special issue on developmental dysgraphia.

KEYWORDS:

• Developmental dysgraphia
• developmental dyslexia
• handwriting
• reading
• spelling

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Dysgraphia (in the sense of impaired spelling) is often included in definitions of developmental dyslexia (see, e.g., the International Dyslexia Association’s definition: “Dyslexia . . . is characterized by difficulties with accurate and/or fluent word recognition and by poor spelling and decoding abilities”, “Definition of Dyslexia”, 2017). The extent to which developmental spelling deficits associate with and dissociate from developmental reading deficits is an important issue for research, and we include within the scope of our discussion developmental dysgraphias occurring in either the presence or absence of reading impairments.

2 Sublexical spelling processes may also draw upon knowledge of morphology (e.g., Treiman, 2017). For example, in English the phoneme sequence /Λs/ is likely to be spelled OUS when it corresponds to a suffix (as in FAMOUS) but not otherwise (e.g., STATUS, FUNGUS).

3 Note that the terms allograph and allographic are used somewhat inconsistently in the literature. Whereas some authors use these terms to refer to letter shape representations with no motoric content, others use the terms in referring to what we have called graphic motor plans.

4 A pseudoword spelling is scored correct if the spelling is plausible given the sound. Hence, for the dictated pseudoword /fi:n/, the spellings FEEN, FENE, and FEAN would all be counted as correct.

5 The normal system that provides a basis for characterizing deficits in developmental dysgraphia is not the fully developed adult system, but rather the partially developed form of that system we would expect to find in a typically developing child (e.g., the writing system of a typically developing 8-year-old if we are considering a developmentally dysgraphic 8-year-old). Consequently, interpretation of developmental dysgraphias requires not only a theory of the adult system, but also assumptions about how this system typically develops over time. Although some researchers (e.g., Bishop, 1997) have argued that developing cognitive systems may be so different from adult systems that theories of adult systems are not useful in interpreting developmental disorders, Castles et al. (2014) make a strong case for the value of adult-system theories in the study of developmental deficits.

6 This assumption is analogous to the assumption in adult cognitive neuropsychology that brain damage does not lead to creation of a cognitive system qualitatively different from the normal system (the “transparency” assumption; see Caramazza, 1986).

7 One important set of unresolved questions concerns relationships between writing and reading mechanisms (e.g., Coltheart & Funnell, 1987; Jones & Rawson, 2016; Tainturier & Rapp, 2001). For example, does a single orthographic long-term memory underlie both reading and spelling, or are there instead separate input (reading) and output (spelling) orthographic long-term memory systems, each specialized to perform different computations (mapping letter to word representations in reading, and word to letter representations in writing)? Research on developmental dysgraphia may shed light on these issues (see, e.g., Hepner et al., 2017; Sotiropoulos & Hanley, 2017, in this special issue).

8 This same point has been discussed extensively in the context of acquired deficits (see Caramazza & McCloskey, 1988; McCloskey & Caramazza, 1988).

Additional information

Funding

Preparation of this article was supported by a Johns Hopkins Science of Learning Institute grant to Michael McCloskey; by National Institutes of Health [grant number DC006740] to Brenda Rapp; and by a generous gift from a donor to the Johns Hopkins University.