Français

Au cours de la dernière décennie, de plus en plus de travaux concernant les processus de lecture prennent en compte le niveau en orthographe des lecteurs adultes. Cet intérêt repose sur l’idée que la connaissance précise de l’orthographe des mots serait un indice de la qualité des représentations lexicales, elle-même essentielle pour assurer l’efficacité des processus de lecture. Cependant, il manque à l’heure actuelle un outil pour la langue franc ̧aise qui permettrait d’évaluer le niveau en orthographe lexicale spécifiquement chez l’adulte normo-lecteur. L’article présente les étapes de construction, de validation et de création de normes du test Brussels Orthographic Quality Scale (BOQS), qui évalue le niveau en orthographe lexicale dans la population adulte. Au final, ce test s’avère être simple d’utilisation, rapide, fiable et apporte une plus-value par rapport aux tests existant dans les batteries d’évaluation des troubles du langage écrit.

Anglais

Over the last decade, more and more studies on reading processes have taken into account adults’ level of spelling ability. This interest is based on the idea that an accurate knowledge of the spelling of words may be a good indicator of the quality of lexical representations, which is itself central to ensuring efficient reading processes. However, faced with a lack of specific spelling ability tests in French for normal adult readers, the study aimed at developing the Brussels Orthographic Quality Scale (BOQS), a spelling ability test. We started with a set of 150 words and selected the 25 items that were the most effective at distinguishing between good and poor spellers. These twenty-five items constitute the BOQS. Then, we validated the BOQS in normal adult readers by comparing it to the scores obtained in an orthographic decision task and to the performance in two other spelling tests used in batteries specially designed to detect written language disorders. The analyses showed that the BOQS enables one to rapidly, easily, and reliably assess spelling abilities, and that it makes it possible to distinguish people more precisely than is possible with the current tests used by speech therapists. Finally, we provide norms built on a very large sample of higher-education students, showing a normal distribution of scores, centered on 50 % of correct responses. The test is freely available at https://osf.io/h8e5m/.