RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN COPYING ABILITY AND THE OTHER WRITING ABILITIES

The ability to copy a text quickly and accurately is important both in school and in daily life. Our study analyses the relationship between copying ability and other writing skills. For this purpose, 674 children with typical development (TD) and 65 children with learning disability (LD) from sixth to eighth grade were tested with a copying task taken from the BVSCO-3 and all other writing tasks included in the same instrument: handwriting speed tasks, spelling tasks, and expressive writing tasks. The aim of the study was to find out whether the copying task could distinguish the TD group from the LD group and whether the other writing skills could predict performance on the copying task. The results showed that children with LD performed worse on the copying task than TD children, both in terms of speed (number of words copied) and accuracy (% of errors). Copying speed was predicted by grade level and by all three writing skills for TD children, but only by handwriting speed and spelling for LD children. Copying accuracy was predicted by gender and all three writing skills for TD children, but only by spelling skills for LD children. These results suggest that children with LD also have difficulty copying a text and benefit less than TD children from their other writing skills