How a special disability in spelling was diagnosed and corrected

Abstract

A twelve-year-old boy with an IQ of 120 had been promoted to the sixth grade although his speech was so unintelligible that even his mother could not understand him; and his spelling was so poor that he could only spell a small per cent of the words on the third grade list. He tried to spell the words as he pronounced them, thus evolving a language of his own. He and his mother spent six weeks at Bloomington where he was given special training in learning to spell by visualizing and not pronouncing the words. The list of instructions given him are printed in this article. The improvement ranged from 45-75% when this method was used. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)