Written Composition in Adults With Dyslexia: The Role of Transcription Skills and Writing Burst in Text Quality

This study investigated the written composition skills of Spanish-speaking university students with and without dyslexia, focusing on the role of spelling fluency and accuracy in text quality. Thirty-nine participants (20 with dyslexia) completed a spelling-to-dictation task and an opinion writing task. Real-time writing measures, such as burst length and pause duration, were recorded using a smartpen to explore their relationship with writing performance. The results showed that adults with dyslexia produced texts of significantly lower quality and made more spelling errors than their peers. However, there were no significant differences in burst length or pause duration between the groups. In the dyslexic group, spelling fluency was strongly associated with text quality, whereas spelling accuracy was not. Mediation analysis indicated that burst length statistically partially mediated the relationship between spelling fluency and text quality. These findings suggest that spelling fluency may play an important role in the writing process of adults with dyslexia, potentially influencing cognitive load and overall text performance.