95 Role of semantics in a phonics through spelling intervention 4 by orthographic errors and lowest for phonological errors. The relative differences in the percentages of errors between the three categories stayed the same: children with dyslexia still made relatively most morphological errors, followed by orthographic errors and lastly phonological errors (basedonpercentages of the total number of possible errors in that category). These results are all in line with the spelling improvements that were found after interventions including phonics, morphological, or orthographic instruction (Galuschka et al., 2020) and illustrate that phonics through spelling interventions have a positive effect on both phonological and orthographic spelling development. Consistent with our fifth hypothesis, we found that for children with dyslexia, the decline in phonological, morphological, and orthographic errors during the phonics through spelling intervention were associated with their level of semantic abilities. Semantic abilities influence the spelling development over time and together with the abovementioned findings, this led to the conclusion that children with better semantic abilities do not only perform better in spelling, in general, but gain more during a phonics through spelling intervention as well. The present study can be seen as a first step in uncovering the development of phonological and orthographic spelling and the role of semantic abilities in this spelling development of children with dyslexia. Some limitations should be acknowledged at this point along with directions of future research. First, results should be interpreted with caution as children could make more phonological errors compared to morphological and orthographic errors. Although we used a standardized Dutch dictation task, it is recommended for future research to consider dictations tasks inwhich errors will bemore evenlydistributedamong these threecategories and inwhichhigher levels are includedas well. This way, the control group will showmore normally distributed scores without floor effects. Future research could find out whether the predictive role of semantic abilities for spelling errors is specific for children with dyslexia or not. Second, we only followed the children with dyslexia over time and did not incorporate a (randomized) control group to evaluate the effects of the intervention. In future research, this latter group could also be followed over time in order to find out whether the effect of semantic abilities on the spelling development over time is typically for children with dyslexia. Follow-up studies could include both skill-based and word-based effects of semantic abilities in order to find out which benefits children most. Third, future research could consider to include the actual time spent on each spelling error category during the intervention in order to see how this influenced the spelling error decline. Fourth, although this study checked for the amount and frequency of the homework that comes with the intervention, there could be an effect of home environment on the change due to intervention, for instance, due to differences in socio-economic status. Follow-up studies focusing on the influence of the home environment are recommended.
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