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Dyslexic adults' concurrent activation of high and low level production processes in written composition

Vincent Connelly

Department of Psychology, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, OX3 0BP vconnelly@brookes.ac.uk

Abstract

Writing text requires the concurrent activation of higher level skills such as planning, idea generation and reviewing with lower level skills such as spelling and handwriting. Olive and Kellog (2002) showed that adults could concurrently activate both high and low level processes during writing. Children had much greater difficultly concurrently activating both high and low level processes in writing tasks. They were constrained by low level processes depleting available mental resources. There is evidence that dyslexic adults have problems low level processes in writing and composition tasks. Their actual handwriting may be slow and spelling poor. There is also evidence that they have less working memory resources available to them. This study shows that dyslexic adults do indeed have problems co-ordinating both high and low level processes concurrently during writing. There was evidence of low level writing processes constraining mental resources available for higher level writing processes. Performance at writing in general was poorer than controls. Implications for models of writing development are discussed as well as the educational implications resulting from the difficulty dyslexic adults have co-ordinating high and low level processes in writing.

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