81 Role of semantics in a phonics through spelling intervention 4 the comparisons between typically developing spellers and spellers with dyslexia are mostly based on post hoc error classifications. The errors are subdivided into three broad categories in order to define the source of the errors: phonological, morphological, and orthographic errors (see Moats, 1995; Sawyer et al., 1999; Tops et al., 2014; Vanderswalmen et al., 2010). Morphological and orthographic errors represent the morphological and orthographic patterns that are part of the orthographic spelling development (Allen, 1992). In phonological errors, a difference occurs between the pronunciation of the written word and the spoken target word. In morphological errors, words maintain the proper pronunciation but are misspelled based on language-specific grammatical rules. In orthographic errors, words also maintain the proper pronunciation but are misspelled based on orthographic conventions or based on the original language a word is from (see Appendix A). Previous research that categorized spelling errors into these categories concluded that children with dyslexia proportionally made the same mistakes, but in higher numbers compared to typically developing children (Bourassa & Treiman, 2003; Bourassa et al., 2006). As a case in point, Bourassa and Treiman (2003) found that both typically developing children and children with dyslexia made mostly linguistically motivated errors. Errors made by children with dyslexia with an average age of 11 years were comparable with mistakes of typically developing children that were on average 3.5 years younger. This is, however, not just a temporarily delay or slow development, but a delay that persists in later life. Indeed, Tops and colleagues (2014) showed that students with dyslexia in higher education, despite their ongoing effort, still made more spelling errors than their peers without dyslexia. However, relative differences between all three error types were not studied yet in children, since Bourassa and Treiman (2003) and Bourassa and colleagues (2006) did not include all three error types. Interventions for spelling development The weak spelling performances of children with dyslexia compared to typically developing children have serious consequences for their general development at school. For instance, when one is still struggling with spelling correctly, working memory cannot be fully used to write down a story in a developed manner (Wakely et al., 2006). This influences text production fluency and quality (Berninger & Swanson, 1994; McCutchen, 2000). Early intervention is needed in order to give these children the same opportunities in life. These interventions are a good way of studying the spelling development of children with dyslexia. In such interventions, it is recommended to include and explicitly teach phonological, morphological, and orthographic awareness of word forms, their parts, and their interrelationships (Berninger et al., 2008; Galuschka et al., 2020). As concluded by Cassar
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