Homophonic forms of regularly inflected verbs have their own orthographic representations: a developmental perspective on spelling errors

In previous research (Sandra, Frisson, & Daems, 1999) we demonstrated that experienced writers of Dutch (18-year-olds) make spelling errors on regularly inflected homophonic verb forms. Intrusion errors, i.e., spelling of the homophonic alternative, occurred more often when the low-frequency homophone had to be written. In the present article we report error data for three groups of less experienced spellers, who have not yet fully mastered the rules for verb suffix spelling: 12-year-olds, 13-year-olds, and 14-year-olds. Younger spellers obviously make many more errors than experienced ones. Whereas this is in part due to inadequate rule mastery/application, their error patterns are also clearly influenced by the frequency relationship between the homophonic forms, i.e., the same factor accounting for the errors of experienced spellers. The conclusion of our present and past research is that homophonic forms of regularly inflected verbs have their own orthographic representations in the mental lexicon and that these representations cause interference in writing (spelling errors), whereas they might cause facilitation in reading (a claim made by dual-route models of reading).     

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.     

Comparison between Oral and Written Spelling in Alzheimer's Disease

Written and oral spelling were compared in 33 patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and 25 control subjects. AD patients had poorer spelling results which were influenced by orthographic difficulty and word frequency, but not by grammatical word class. Lexical spelling was also more deteriorated than phonological spelling. Moreover, oral spelling was more impaired than written spelling in AD patients, whereas no difference was present between oral and written spelling of controls. Analysis of spelling errors showed that, for controls, errors were predominantly phonologically accurate in both spelling tasks. Significantly, AD patients produced more phonologically accurate than inaccurate errors in written spelling, whereas these errors did not differ in oral spelling. In contrast to controls who produced more constant than variable responses in oral and written spelling, AD patients made more variable responses (words correctly spelled in one task but incorrectly in the other) and they showed many instances of variable errors (different misspellings from one spelling task to the other). Two stepwise regression procedures showed that written misspellings were specifically correlated with language impairment, whereas oral spelling errors were correlated with attentional and language disorders. These results suggest that AD increases the attentional demands of oral spelling process as compared to written spelling. This dissociation argues, either for a unique Graphemic Buffer in which oral spelling requires more attentional resources than written spelling or for the hypothesis of separate buffers for oral and written spelling.     

An Elicited‐Production Study of Inflectional Verb Morphology in Child Finnish

Many generativist accounts (e.g., Wexler, 1998) argue for very early knowledge of inflection on the basis of very low rates of person/number marking errors in young children's speech. However, studies of Spanish (Aguado‐Orea & Pine, 2015) and Brazilian Portuguese (Rubino & Pine, 1998) have revealed that these low overall error rates actually hide important differences across the verb paradigm. The present study investigated children's production of person/number marked verbs by eliciting present tense verb forms from 82 native Finnish‐speaking children aged 2;2–4;8 years. Four main findings were observed: (a) Rates of person/number marking errors were higher in low‐frequency person/number contexts, even excluding children who showed no evidence of having learned the relevant morpheme, (b) most errors involved the use of higher frequency forms in lower frequency person/number contexts, (c) error rates were predicted not only by the frequency of person/number contexts (e.g., 3sg > 2pl) but also by the frequency of individual “ready‐inflected” lexical target forms, and (d) for low‐frequency verbs, lower error rates were observed for verbs with high phonological neighborhood density. It is concluded that any successful account of the development of verb inflection will need to incorporate both (a) rote‐storage and retrieval of individual inflected forms and (b) phonological analogy across them.     

THE ECOLOGY OF SPELLING: A LENS MODEL ANALYSIS OF SPELLING ERRORS AND STUDENT JUDGMENTS OF SPELLING DIFFICULTY

Abstract

Students who were identified by their teachers as poor spellers were asked to judge the difficulty they would have in spelling each of 100 words that were representative of the sorts of words they tended to misspell in their various subject areas (the spelling ecology). After making difficulty judgments, the students were then asked to spell each word on the list. Spelling errors were scored as either phonetic or nonphonetic. The researchers rated each of the 100 words on ten characteristics: number of letters, syllables, letters per syllable, double and silent letters; schwa, ambiguous, and unusual sounds; and two measures of familiarity to the student. This task was replicated after a four‐week period to check for spelling and judgment consistency. Spelling errors and judgments of spelling difficulty were analyzed using the double system Lens Model using the ten word characteristics as “cues” in the analysis. Results showed only moderate agreement between difficulty judgments and spelling errors, and fairly consistent differences between those word characteristics that were predictive of perceived spelling difficulty and those predictive of phonetic and nonphonetic errors. Several different patterns of cue weights were noted for spelling errors whereas spelling difficulty judgments were primarily based upon word familiarity. Implications are drawn for the further investigation of spelling errors and of how students decide what constitutes a “hard” word to spell and for the potential improvement of the spelling judgment process using cognitive feedback from the Lens Model.

The characterization of spelling as a cognitive activity has received increasing attention in the educational research literature. For example, two recent issues of Reading Psychology (Numbers 2 and 3, 1989) were entirely devoted to research on spelling. Much of this work has focused on spelling strategies (e.g., Anderson, 1985, Kreiner & Gough, 1990, and Olson, Logan, & Lindsey, 1989), spelling problems and types of errors (e.g., see Frith, 1980, and Weber & Henderson, 1989), and the relationship between spelling and reading (e.g., Templeton, 1989, and Zutell & Rasinski, 1989). However, there has been very little research on the issues of the criteria individuals use in deciding that a particular word is difficult or easy to spell, and the accuracy and effects of such a decision. We refer here to the more metacognitive aspects of the task ecology of spelling, and the effects of which may be shown in decisions to avoid or at least minimize the cognitive efforts expended in spelling a perceived “hard” word.

The issue of judging spelling difficulty forms the focus of the present study. Here we attempt to document those features of a word that make students think it would be hard or easy to spell. We then relate this judgment process to errors made when students attempt to spell words. Finally, we compare the relative importance of various features of words as predictors of both difficulty judgments and actual spelling errors.     

Verb retrieval in brain-damaged subjects: 1. Analysis of stimulus, lexical, and conceptual factors

Verb retrieval for action naming was assessed in 53 brain-damaged subjects by administering a standardized test with 100 items. The goal of the study was to gain further insight into the nature of verb processing impairments by investigating the influence of several kinds of stimulus, lexical, and conceptual factors on the subjects' performance at the level of group tendencies and also at the level of individual differences. (1) Stimulus factors: visual complexity, familiarity, image agreement, and one vs. two pictures (which corresponds to ongoing vs. completed actions); (2) lexical factors: name agreement, verb frequency, and whether the root of the target verb has a homophonous noun; (3) conceptual factors: whether the action is done with the hand or the body, whether the action involves one or two core participants, whether the undergoer of the action has a change of internal state, whether the undergoer has a change of spatial location, and whether the actor makes use of an instrument in carrying out the action. The subjects were divided into an impaired group (n = 19) and an unimpaired group (n = 34) on the basis of their overall performance on the test. For both groups of subjects, verb retrieval was significantly affected by the following factors: familiarity, image agreement, name agreement, homophonous noun, and undergoer change of location. These results indicate that, at the level of group analysis, some factors have a stronger influence on verb retrieval for action naming than others. Moreover, the finding that the two groups exhibited the same general pattern of factor sensitivity suggests that although the processing efficiency of the mechanisms that subserve verb retrieval is degraded in the impaired group, the basic functional properties of these mechanisms may not be qualitatively very different from those of the unimpaired group. Further analyses were conducted at the level of individual subjects and revealed a considerable amount of variation with regard to factor sensitivity. Many patterns of associations and dissociations of factors were found across the subjects, which suggests that the task of retrieving verbs for naming actions is quite complex and that different subjects can be influenced by different properties of both the stimuli and the target verbs.     

Syllables and spelling units affect feature integration in words

Three experiments showed that syllables and spelling patterns function as higher order units in word perception. Subjects were required to identify the color of a target letter in briefly presented words composed of different-colored letters. In Experiment 1, subjects incorrectly reported the color of a nontarget letter (conjunction error) more often in one-syllable words containing few spelling units than in two-syllable words containing many spelling units. Experiment 2 showed that subjects made more conjunction errors in one-syllable words than in two-syllable words when the number of spelling patterns was controlled. Experiment 3 showed that conjunction errors decreased as spelling units increased when the number of syllables was held constant. Experiments 1 and 3 also showed that more conjunction errors occurred within syllabic and spelling units than between these units. These findings are discussed in light of previous research on syllable and spelling pattern effects.     

Overtensing and the effect of regularity

Regularly inflected forms often behave differently in language production than irregular forms. These differences are often used to argue that irregular forms are listed in the lexicon but regular forms are produced by rule. Using an experimental speech production task with adults, it is shown that overtensing errors, where a tensed verb is used in place of an infinitive, predominantly involve irregular forms, but that the differences may be due to phonological confounds, not to regularity per se. Errors involve vowel‐changing irregular forms more than suffixing inflected forms, with at best a small difference between regular ‐ed and irregular ‐en. Frequency effects on overtensing errors require a model in which the past‐tense and base forms of the verb are in competition and in which activation functions are nonlinear, and rule out models with specialized subnetworks for past‐tense forms. Implications for theories of language production are discussed.     

Analogical effects in reading Dutch verb forms

Previous research has shown that the production of morphologically complex words in isolation is affected by the properties of morphologically, phonologically, or semantically similar words stored in the mental lexicon. We report five experiments with Dutch speakers that show that reading an inflectional word form in its linguistic context is also affected by analogical sets of formally similar words. Using the self-paced reading technique, we show in Experiments 1-3 that an incorrectly spelled suffix delays readers less if the incorrect spelling is in line with the spelling of verbal suffixes in other inflectional forms of the same verb. In Experiments 4 and 5, our use of the self-paced reading technique shows that formally similar words with different stems affect the reading of incorrect suffixal allomorphs on a given stem. These intra- and interparadigmatic effects in reading may be due to online processes or to the storage of incorrect forms resulting from analogical effects in production.     

Lexical orthographic knowledge develops from the beginning of literacy acquisition

This study reports two experiments assessing the spelling performance of French first graders after 3 months and after 9 months of literacy instruction. The participants were asked to spell high and low frequency irregular words (Experiment 1) and pseudowords, some of which had lexical neighbours (Experiment 2). The lexical database which children had been exposed to was strictly controlled. Both a frequency effect in word spelling accuracy and an analogy effect in pseudoword spelling were obtained after only 3 months of reading instruction. The results suggest that children establish specific orthographic knowledge from the very beginning of literacy acquisition.     

Investigating the effects of distance and number interference in processing subject-verb dependencies: an ERP study

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were used to investigate whether the processing of subject-verb dependencies is influenced by (1) the linear distance between the subject and the verb and (2) the presence of an intervening noun phrase with interfering number features. Linear distance did not affect integration and diagnosis or revision processes at the verb, as indexed by early negative and P600 components. This is in accordance with hierarchy-based models of reanalysis, but is problematic for distance-based integration models. However, tracking of the subject features is affected by linear factors: more judgment errors were made in the long compared to the short condition. Furthermore, the presence of a plural object between the singular subject and the verb led to more judgment errors, and an enhanced positivity around 250 ms for the grammatical verbs. This suggests that linear factors affect feature tracking, but not integration processes following feature retrieval or repair processes following the detection of a mismatch.     

Proofreading errors in good and poor readers

Seven-year-old children classified as good and poor readers carried out a proofreading task on two passages varying in level of difficulty. Misspellings were introduced by transposing two adjacent letters in the work "the," other three-letter words, and longer words. While both groups of readers were able to identify the correct spelling of the misspelled words on a spelling test, poor readers made significantly more proofreading errors. Word length had a significant effect on performance, indicating that sensitivity to word configuration is important for successful proofreading. The pattern of proofreading errors did not reflect underlying differences which might relate to strategies used by the two groups in normal reading. The results are compared with those from other proofreading and letter detection experiments in order to highlight methodological implications when such tasks are used to verify hypotheses concerned with normal reading strategies.     

The role of meaning in past-tense inflection: evidence from polysemy and denominal derivation

Although English verbs can be either regular (walk-walked) or irregular (sing-sang), "denominal verbs" that are derived from nouns, such as the use of the verb ring derived from the noun a ring, take the regular form even if they are homophonous with an existing irregular verb: The soldiers ringed the city rather than *The soldiers rang the city. Is this regularization due to a semantic difference from the usual verb, or is it due to the application of the default rule, namely VERB+ -ed suffix? In Experiment 1, participants rated the semantic similarity of the extended senses of polysemous verbs and denominal verbs to their central senses. Experiment 2 examined the acceptability of the regular and irregular past tenses of the different verbs. The results showed that all the denominal verbs were rated as more acceptable for the regular inflection than the same verbs used polysemously, even though the two were semantically equally similar to the central meaning. Thus, the derivation of the verb (nominal or verbal) determined the past-tense preference more than semantic variables, consistent with dual-route models of verb inflection.     

Multiple levels of letter representation in written spelling: evidence from a single case of dysgraphia with multiple deficits

In this paper, we report a detailed analysis of the impaired performance of a dysgraphic individual, AD, who produced similar rates of letter-level errors in written spelling, oral spelling, and typing. We found that the distribution of various letter error types displayed a distinct pattern in written spelling on the one hand and in oral spelling and typing on the other. In particular, noncontextual letter substitution errors (i.e., errors in which the erroneous letter that replaces the target letter does not occur elsewhere within the word) were virtually absent in oral spelling and typing and mainly found in written spelling. In contrast, letter deletion errors and multiple-letter errors were typically found in oral spelling and very exceptional in written spelling. Only contextual letter substitution errors (i.e., errors in which the erroneous letter that replaces the target letter is identical to a letter occurring earlier or later in the word) were found in similar proportions in the three tasks. We argue that these contrasting patterns of letter error distribution result from damage to two distinct levels of letter representation and processing within the spelling system, namely, the amodal graphemic representation held in the graphemic buffer and the letter form representation computed by subsequent writing-specific processes. Then, we examined the relationship between error and target in the letter substitution errors produced in written and oral spelling and found evidence that distinct types of letter representation are processed at each of the hypothetized levels of damage: symbolic letter representation at the graphemic level and representation of the component graphic strokes at the letter form processing level.     

“Without the spelling errors I would have shortlisted her…”: The impact of spelling errors on recruiters’ choice during the personnel selection process

Despite the time spent on writing at work and employers’ dissatisfaction with their employees’ spelling skills, little is known about recruiters’ attribution, and decision making when they read application forms with spelling errors. This study examines the impact of spelling and typographic errors on recruiters’ attributions about applicants, and on their shortlisting decision. Based on a sample of 20 French recruiters, we conducted an experiment to collect both qualitative data through the verbal protocol method and quantitative data. Specific verbal reports are associated with different types of errors. Recruiters also form attributions about candidates. We demonstrate that spelling errors affect recruiters’ behavior more negatively than typographic ones. We discuss the implications of these findings for researchers and practitioners.     

Dialect and authography: some differences between American and British spellers

Two experiments examined whether American and British university students make different kinds of spelling errors as a function of the differences between their dialects. The American students spoke a rhotic dialect, pronouncing an /r/ in such words as leper, hermit, horde, and gnarl. The British students, with their nonrhotic dialect, did not include an /r/ in such words. The dialect differences led to different spelling errors in the 2 groups. For example, the British students sometimes misspelled horde as "haud" because its vowel has the alternative spelling au in their dialect. They sometimes spelled polka as "polker" because its final vowel is often spelled as er in other words. The U.S. students were much less likely to make such errors, although they did make other errors that reflected aspects of their dialect. Phonology, far from being superseded by other strategies in the development of spelling, continues to be important for adults.     

Why did I right that? Factors that influence the production of homophone substitution errors

Despite considerable research on language production errors involving speech, little research exists in the complementary domain of writing. Two experiments investigated the production of homophone substitution errors, which occur when a contextually appropriate word (e.g., beech) is replaced with its homophone (e.g., beach tree). Participants wrote down auditorily presented sentences containing dominant or subordinate homophones. Homophones were preceded by a lexical prime that overlapped in phonology and orthography (e.g., teacher) or only orthography (e.g., headmaster) with the target homophone. Results showed more substitution errors when the context elicited a subordinate homophone than when it elicited a dominant homophone. Furthermore, both types of primes equivalently increased production of homophone errors relative to control words (e.g., lawyer), suggesting that only orthographic overlap between the prime and target was necessary to influence errors. These results are explained within dual-route models of spelling, which postulate an interaction between lexical and sublexical routes when spelling.     

Competition in lexical processing of Italian noun/verb homographs

The study investigates the lexical representation of Italian noun/verb homographs, introducing a factor which has been analysed in production studies: the specific-word frequency (SWF). The SWF parameter allows to understand whether the grammatical class information is specified within the lexical knowledge or it is selected during post-lexical stages. We ran six lexical decision tasks employing the priming paradigm and a grammatical decision task to investigate the lexical representation of noun/verb homographs. In addition, we sought to determine the role played by the frequency of representations and the temporal activation of the grammatical class information. Our findings support the claim that these forms have independent representations for each syntactic role they can play. We interpreted these findings in the light of what we call the “Nominal Dominance” effect, which affects the lexical access of noun/verb homographs. We also discuss the relation between nominal dominance and lexical frequency.