Predominant Dysgraphia in Primary-School Students in Natural Tuvan-Russian Bilingual Environment

Abstract

The article describes the predominant type of dysgraphia in primary-school students that live and study in a bicultural and bilingual environment of the Republic of Tuva, Russia. The research revealed the effect of social factors on the development of written expression as a manifestation of a higher mental function, i.e., speech. Domestic social psychology pays little scientific attention to speech formation in the conditions of natural bilingualism, which gives relevance and novelty to this neuropsychological research. Its objective was to identify the leading type of dysgraphia in primary-school children and subject it to quantitative and qualitative analyses. The author counted dysgraphic errors in a text written by primary-school students and used the neuropsychological approach to classify them. Acoustic-kinesthetic (phonemic) dysgraphia proved to be the most frequent type of dysgraphia. It was caused by Tuvan pronunciation and spelling peculiarities, which proved that the bilingual Tuvan-Russian environment affects written speech of primary-school students.

Keywords

• neuropsychology
• letters
• writing disorders
• dysgraphia
• neuropsychological approach
• primary-school students
• republic of tuva