140 Chapter 6 reading development with a primary focus on phonological recoding, which is heavily influenced by phonological awareness and rapid naming. Besides the indirect relation of semantic abilities on reading, we found a direct relation of semantic abilities on both phonological and orthographic processes in spelling. It turns out that the phonologyorthography connection, that is necessary for spelling, may benefit from a strong base of semantic representations as described in the triangular framework (Seidenberg & McClelland, 1989). These results are in line with other studies that found beneficial effects of semantic abilities on learning to spell (see Ouellette, 2010; Ouellette & Fraser, 2009). The beneficial effect of semantic abilities is in line with the lexical restructuring hypothesis and the stimulating effect of well-developed semantic representations on phonological representations. Whenwe approach semantic abilities in amore dynamic assessment via verbal learning, similar outcomes were evidenced. We did not find relationships between verbal learning and reading but did find a direct positive relationships between verbal learning and spelling. The finding that verbal learning was not related to reading contrasts findings by Tijms (2004) but the positive influence of verbal learning on spelling levels among children with dyslexia is in line with findings by Tijms (2004) and also to results from chapter 4. In addition to the findings of Tijms (2004), we found that the influence of verbal learning on spelling is not unique for children with dyslexia, but also applies to typically developing children. Overall, the results fit the idea that better verbal learning may support the specificity and redundancy of the phonological lexicon and therefore stimulates literacy development (Shaywitz et al., 2003), but shows that the effect is limited to spelling only. This can be explained by the fact that spelling relies more on phonological representations compared to reading (Landerl & Wimmer, 2008). The results showed no compensatory role of verbal consolidation. This could be because verbal consolidation is closely related to automaticity (Manoach & Stickgold, 2009). Indeed, we found rapid automatized naming to be associated with verbal consolidation for children with dyslexia. These findings show the relevance of a broad and deep semantic network in the reading and spelling development of children with dyslexia. In addition, it was shown that a dynamic assessment of verbal learning could be a useful instrument to find out more about compensatory mechanism for spelling development of children with and without dyslexia. Semantic abilities and the ability to learn verbal information could thus be seen as strengths that could help all children, but especially children with dyslexia to perform relatively better in reading and spelling. This is in line with the Multifactorial causal model of dyslexia (e.g., Catts et al., 2017) indicating that both weaknesses and strengths may predict reading and spelling levels (Astle & FletcherMartin, 2020). Although the found effects were small (and in one case indirect), these
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