Adaptation of Writing to Orthographic Change

Abstract

Research about regularizing English orthography (involving a change of 30% of the words in the text) has indicated that adults regain a normal reading speed after they have read 6,000 words of regularized text. The spelling changes mainly involved applying the most common rules of spelling consistently across all text. For instance, the silent-e rule was applied consistently on long vowel phonemes in the penultimate phoneme position (e.g., light became lite). In the present experiment, the effects of such spelling changes on writing performance were explored. During an afternoon session, writing speed when converting text to the new orthography improved significantly but was still slower than normal. The results for spelling accuracy were more equivocal; however, nearly one third of the subjects were spelling very accurately in the new orthography by the end of the session. Overall, orthographic change has a more substantial impact on writing speed than on reading speed.