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Word spelling performance of normal children from the first to the fifth grade was analysed and compared with the performance of children having a reading and spelling impairment characteristic of surface dyslexia. The quantitative analysis of their productions for word spelling to dictation showed that the performance of children with surface dyslexia was very similar to that of younger control children of the same reading level. The qualitative analysis of the erroneous spellings showed that for children with surface dyslexia, knowledge of the phonology-to-orthography correspondences was comparable to that of chronological-age-matched children. In contrast, the lexical knowledge of children with surface dyslexia was very poor and close to that of very beginning readers. The results suggest that the spelling deficit associated with developmental surface dyslexia results from a cognitive disorder that prevents the establishment of specific lexical spelling knowledge.
