Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal 9: 387–406, 1997. 387 R. Treiman (ed.), Spelling, pp. [73–92] c 1997 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. The spelling performance of ESL and native speakers of English as a function of reading skill LESLY WADE-WOOLLEY & LINDA S. SIEGEL Department of Educational Psychology & Special Education, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada Abstract. Seventy-nine children in grade two spelled pseudowords and real words differing in vowel quality and the presence or absence of consonant clusters, and their accuracy was examined as a function of native language and reading ability. Because of the heavy reliance on phonological processing in spelling, we hypothesized that poor readers, who typically exhibit impaired ability to sequence, segment and transform phonemes into graphemes, would spell more poorly than average readers. This hypothesis was substantiated. Second language speakers also displayed phonological deficits relative to native speakers, and we hypothesized that this deficit would also be obvious in spelling accuracy. However, second language speakers performed in a manner similar to native speakers. Supporting this are findings from multiple regressions showing that the processing profiles of second language speakers and native speakers are strikingly similar, and that only poor readers of both language backgrounds diverge from the common patterns and display pervasive phonological deficits. Key words: Spelling, Second language, Word recognition, Phonological processing, Dyslexia Introduction Reading disability is often attributed to a deficit in phonological process- ing (e.g., Stanovich 1988), which is associated with problems in working memory, lexical access and phonological awareness. This robust relation between literacy and phonological processing is not confined to English (e.g., Ben-Dror, Bentin & Frost 1995), and it continues to be evident in older children, adolescents, and adults (Bruck 1990; Fawcett & Nicolson 1995; Pennington, Van Orden, Smith, Dreen & Haith 1990; Pratt & Brady 1988; Read & Ruyter 1985). The phonological deficit hypothesis predicts that reading disabled individ- uals will have difficulty with any task involving the parsing of phonological strings. This is often evident in the inability to successfully apply grapheme- to-phoneme conversion operations to unknown words in reading, and also in the application of phoneme-to-grapheme correspondences in spelling. Posses- sion of a phonological deficit, however, does not imply the complete inability to learn to read and spell. Although some dyslexics do remain poor readers, [73]