ORIGINAL PAPER
A resource of errors written in Spanish by people with
dyslexia and its linguistic, phonetic and visual analysis
Luz Rello
1
· Ricardo Baeza-Yates
2,3
·
Joaquim Llisterri
4
Published online: 3 February 2016
© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016
Abstract In this work we introduce the analysis of DysList, a language resource
for Spanish composed of a list of unique spelling errors extracted from a collection
of texts written by people with dyslexia. Each of the errors was annotated with a set
of characteristics as well as with visual and phonetic features. To the best of our
knowledge, this is the largest resource of this kind in Spanish. We also analyzed all
the features of Spanish errors and our main finding is that dyslexic errors are
phonetically and visually motivated.
Keywords Errors · Dyslexia · Visual · Phonetics · Resource · Spanish
1 Introduction
Dyslexia is a reading and spelling disorder of neurological origin (American
Psychiatric Association 2000; World Health Organization 1993).
1
It is characterized
by difficulties with accurate and fluent word recognition and by poor spelling and
decoding abilities. These difficulties typically result from a deficit in the
& Luz Rello
luzrello@gmail.com
1
HCI Institute, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Avenue,
Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA
2
Web Research Group, Univ. Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain
3
Yahoo Labs, Sunnyvale, CA, USA
4
Departament de Filologia Espanyola, Universitat Auto`noma de Barcelona, 08193 Bellaterra,
Spain
1
In some literature, dyslexia is referred to as a specific reading disability only (Vellutino et al. 2004) and
dysgraphia as its written manifestation (Romani et al. 1999).
123
Lang Resources & Evaluation (2017) 51:379–408
DOI 10.1007/s10579-015-9329-0