The acquisition of spelling skills in bilingual children with Italian L2

The aim of this study was to deepen the acquisition of orthographic skills and their relationship with environmental and linguistic variables in bilingual and monolingual children. The study involved 86 monolinguals and 43 bilinguals (aged 9-11 years), who were administered with reading and writing tests for words and non-words, passage dictation, narrative written production, morphosyntactic comprehension and repetition of non-words; linguistic history and socio- economic status have also been investigated. Writing seems to require longer acquisition times than reading for bilinguals, however there are some advantages in narrative production tasks. Age of exposure, verbal knowledge, morphosyntactic comprehension and reading skills seem to play an important role in predicting writing skills in the bilingual group.