Why Use a Copy Task to Study Spelling in Handwriting?

T he aim of this chapter is to show that even though the copy task is used less frequentlythanthedictationtask,itisjustasrelevantforunderstandinghowthespellingprocessworks,especiallywhen the real-time approach is adopted.Inthecaseoflanguageswithadeeporthography,suchasEnglishor French,whicharealsomorphophonemicorthographies,learninghowtospellde£ned here as the process involved in retrieving or working out the sequence of graphemesinaword(Stef¶er,2001)—istimeconsuming,frequentlydif£cult,and sometimesproblematicforschoolchildren(Graham,Harris,&Chorzempa,2002; Manesse & Cogis, 2007).