Effects of spelling errors on the perception of writers

The authors investigated the perceived relationship between spelling errors and cognitive abilities in a series of 3 experiments. Specifically, they examined whether college students' ratings of an author's intellectual ability, logical ability, and writing ability were affected by the presence of spelling errors. In the 1st experiment, the presence of 4 spelling errors in a short essay did not significantly affect the ratings. The spelling ability of college students, as measured by a standard oral dictation spelling test, was moderately conelated with a brief test of intelligence. In a 2nd experiment, college students rated the author of a short essay as having lower ability when there was a large number of spelling errors. The effect was more pronounced on the ratings of writing ability than it was on the ratings of logical ability or intellectual ability. This finding was replicated in a 3rd experiment, in which the essay contained misspellings actually made by writers. The results suggest that spelling errors can affect how people perceive writers, particularly when there are many spelling errors. College students appear to attribute spelling errors more to writing ability than they do to general cognitive abilities such as intelligence and logical ability.     

Facilitation of retrieval by perceptual structure

Summary The effectiveness of a part of a stimulus as a retrieval cue for the whole is investigated in two experiments. Stimuli consisting of a series of eight colored dots were presented for 7s. In Experiment 1, the first three dots of a stimulus made up the cue. A structural compatibility between stimulus and cue was shown to enhance recall. Experiment 2 used only the first dot as a cue for the same stimuli as in Experiment 1 in order to control the possible alternative prediction based on Garner's work that the effect was due to a difference in complexity of stimuli, regardless of compatibility with the cue. The compatibility predictions are derived from a model based on a hierarchy principle by Buffart.     

Phonological spelling

A case study is presented of phonological spelling, an acquired spelling disorder in which the primary symptom is the occurrence of phonologically plausible errors (e.g. "flood" → flud). Not all of the patient's spelling errors are as phonologically "perfect" as this example; but it is arguable that the errors primarily derive from a routine which segments a phonological code and assigns orthographic representations to these individual segments. This account of errors in phonological spelling is contrasted with an interpretation of oral reading errors in surface dyslexia. We conclude that errors in the two disorders do not reveal a precise parallel, and that the contrast is partly attributable to the differential role of comprehension in reading and spelling.     

Facilitation of retention by white noise.

Second and fifth grade subjects were given three verbal tasks: serial, free recall, or paired-associate learning. Retention tests were administered immediately after the acquisition phase or following a long delay. Half the subjects were exposed to a 2-min period of bursts of white noise (arousal) immediately prior to the retention test. The finding of primary interest was that white noise produced substantial improvement in performance relative to a control condition. This effect may be more pronounced for long-term memory than for short-term memory. Although older children exhibited better long-term memory than younger subjects, no interaction of age with arousal condition was observed.     

Written spelling agraphia

When a disorder of single word writing is seen in conjunction with preserved oral spelling and intact written grapheme formation ("written spelling agraphia"), the deficit may be presumed to lie somewhere between letter choice and written motor output. Two potential deficits are considered: (1) visual letter codes are not activated properly and (2) the information contained within properly activated visual letter codes fails to reach intact graphic motor patterns. Two patients with written spelling agraphia were each given a series of tests aimed at distinguishing between the two possibilities. Results suggest that the written spelling agraphia seen in these two patients arises from different underlying deficits. The results are discussed in terms of the patients' CT scan lesion sites, which were markedly different.     

Facilitation of Extinction of Conditioned Fear by D-Cycloserine

Abstract— Excessive fear and anxiety are characteristic of disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and phobias and are believed to reflect abnormalities in neural systems governing the development and reduction of conditioned fear. Conditioned fear can be suppressed through a process known as extinction, in which repeated exposure to a feared stimulus in the absence of an aversive event leads to a gradual reduction in the fear response to that stimulus. Like conditioned fear learning, extinction is dependent on a particular protein (the N-methyl-D-aspartate or NMDA receptor) in a part of the brain called the amygdala. Blockade of this receptor blocks extinction and improving the activity of this receptor with a drug called D-cycloserine speeds up extinction in rats. Because exposure-based psychotherapy for fear disorders in humans resembles extinction in several respects, we investigated whether D-cycloserine might facilitate the loss of fear in human patients. Consistent with findings from the animal laboratory, patients receiving D-cycloserine benefited more from exposure-based psychotherapy than did placebo-treated controls. Although very preliminary, these data provide initial support for the use of cognitive enhancers in psychotherapy and demonstrate that preclinical studies in rodents can have direct benefits to humans.     

Facilitation of responses by task-irrelevant complex deviant stimuli

Novel stimuli reliably attract attention, suggesting that novelty may disrupt performance when it is task-irrelevant. However, under certain circumstances novel stimuli can also elicit a general alerting response having beneficial effects on performance. In a series of experiments we investigated whether different aspects of novelty – stimulus novelty, contextual novelty, surprise, deviance, and relative complexity – lead to distraction or facilitation. We used a version of the visual oddball paradigm in which participants responded to an occasional auditory target. Participants responded faster to this auditory target when it occurred during the presentation of novel visual stimuli than of standard stimuli, especially at SOAs of 0 and 200 ms (Experiment 1). Facilitation was absent for both infrequent simple deviants and frequent complex images (Experiment 2). However, repeated complex deviant images did facilitate responses to the auditory target at the 200 ms SOA (Experiment 3). These findings suggest that task-irrelevant deviant visual stimuli can facilitate responses to an unrelated auditory target in a short 0–200 millisecond time-window after presentation. This only occurs when the deviant stimuli are complex relative to standard stimuli. We link our findings to the novelty P3, which is generated under the same circumstances, and to the adaptive gain theory of the locus coeruleus–norepinephrine system (Aston-Jones and Cohen, 2005), which may explain the timing of the effects.     

Facilitation of discriminated lever-press avoidance by noncontingent shocks

Two experiments investigated the effect of presenting a brief noncontingent, unsignaled shock prior to warning-signal onset on discriminated lever-press avoidance behavior in rats. The main finding was that noncontingent shock delivered 2 sec but not 16 sec prior to warning-signal onset facilitated avoidance performance and learning. These results were predicted on the basis of shock-elicited response bursting which was expected to increase the operant level of the lever-press response at short shock-warning signal intervals. It was suggested that species-specific limitations on rats' lever-press avoidance are not unconditional, but rather can be overcome with environmental manipulations.     

The development of beliefs about spelling and their relationship to spelling performance

This study examined relations among spelling performance and students' beliefs about spelling, including self-efficacy for spelling ability, outcome expectancy for spelling, and attributions for good spelling across grades 4, 7, and 10. Spelling self-efficacy remained relatively constant across grades. Spelling outcome expectancies for adult life and school declined across grades, as did effort and ability attributions for spelling success, with a disproportional decrease in ability attributions between grades 4 and 7. Self-efficacy was the strongest predictor of spelling performance at all grade levels; attribution for ability entered into the regression for grade 4 students, while outcome expectancies for school and writing were more important in grades 7 and 10. Cluster analyses on the grade 10 sample showed that students with high efficacy as spellers and high outcome expectancy of spelling for writing were the best spellers, with the highest performance reserved for those who attributed good spelling more to effort than ability. The impact of spelling instruction on developing beliefs is discussed.     

Morphological knowledge as revealed in children's spelling accuracy and reports of spelling strategies

The goal of the current research was to assess whether children can make strategic use of morphological relations among words to spell. French-speaking children in Grade 4 spelled three word types: (a) phonological words that had regular phoneme-grapheme correspondences, (b) morphological words that had silent consonant endings for which a derivative revealed the silent ending, and (c) lexical words that had silent consonant endings for which no familiar derivative revealed the ending. Children were also asked to provide immediate retrospective reports of the strategies used to spell each word. Two experiments (Ns = 46 and 39) were conducted. As expected, children in Grade 4 spelled phonological words more accurately than they did words with silent consonant endings. In addition, children spelled morphological words more accurately than they did lexical words. Reports of using retrieval were associated with accurate performance across word types. Importantly, reports of using morphological strategies to spell morphological words were associated with a similar level of accuracy, as were reports of using retrieval. Even though children reported using a phonological strategy frequently across all word types, this strategy was associated with accurate performance only for spelling phonological words. Experiment 2 replicated the results of Experiment 1 with another set of stimuli and also showed that children's morphological awareness predicted their spelling accuracy for morphological words as well as the reported frequency of morphological strategy use. In sum, the findings revealed that most children showed evidence of adaptive strategy use.     

Reaction time measures of spelling: testing a two-strategy model of skilled spelling.

Two strategies have been suggested to be important in skilled English spelling: a lexical strategy, which relies on word-specific graphemic information, and a rule strategy, which relies on phoneme-to-grapheme correspondences. Limitations in the usefulness of spelling accuracy as a dependent variable make it difficult to test claims about how the strategies might work together. Two experimental paradigms that measure both spelling accuracy and time are suggested to be useful. Results produced with the paradigms were consistent with the claims that skilled spellers make use of both strategies and that the lexical strategy is more useful than the rule strategy. Working memory may be important in combining products of both strategies. Results were inconsistent with the claim that the rule strategy is invoked only when the lexical strategy fails to produce a complete spelling.     

Environmental context-dependent homophone spelling

Two experiments provided evidence of environmental context-dependent memory using a homophone spelling test (e.g., Jacoby & Witherspoon, 1982), an implicit, indirect measure of memory (Richardson-Klavehn & Bjork, 1988). Context reinstatement significantly increased priming in both experiments. The finding of environmental context reinstatement effects with this implicit memory test and others (Garberg & Radtke, 1986; Graf, 1988) indicates that the effect can be found reliably using a test that does not encourage subjects to generate their own context cues from memory.     

Facilitation of word recognition by semantic priming in schizophrenia

Schizophrenic (n = 21), bipolar (n = 18), and normal control subjects (n = 21) were compared on a word recognition measure of semantic priming. The task involved the presentation of related, neutral, and unrelated word pairs; the second word (target word) in each pair was presented in a degraded form. Facilitation was defined as the accuracy of target word recognition for the related word pairs minus accuracy for the neutral word pairs. Titration, achieved by manipulating the degradation of the target word, was used to maintain each subject's overall accuracy for related and neutral items at approximately 50%. This procedure minimized the artifactual effects of overall accuracy on the difference score. Schizophrenics exceeded both normal control subjects and bipolar subjects on facilitation. Bipolar subjects did not differ from control subjects. The results support Maher's hypothesis that semantic priming effects are heightened in schizophrenia.     

Automaticity in spelling competence

Two studies examined the speed with which good spellers and poor spellers spell easy and difficult words. At both the elementary school (Grades 3 and 4) and undergraduate levels, good spellers spelled words more quickly than poor spellers. This difference appeared even for very easy words that all subjects could spell. Implications for the importance of automaticity in spelling competence are discussed.