Spelling Errors Impede Recognition of Correctly Spelled Word Forms

ABSTRACT

Spelling errors are typically thought of as an effect of a word’s weak orthographic representation in an individual mind. What if existence of spelling errors is a partial cause of effortful orthographic learning and word recognition? We selected words that had homophonic substandard spelling variants of varying frequency (e.g., innocent and inocent occur in 69% and 31% of occurrences of the word, respectively). Conventional spellings were presented for recognition either in context (Experiment 1, eye-tracking sentence reading) or in isolation (Experiment 2, lexical decision). Words elicited longer fixation durations and lexical decision latencies if there was more uncertainty (higher entropy) regarding which spelling is a preferred one. The inhibitory effect of frequency was not modulated by spelling or other reading skill. This finding is in line with theories of learning that predict spelling errors to weaken associations between conventional spellings and the word’s meaning.

Acknowledgments

We thank three anonymous reviewers and Raymond Bertram for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this article.

Funding

This work was supported by the following research grants: the Canadian NSERC Discovery grant RGPIN/402395-2012 (Kuperman, PI), the National Institutes of Health R01 grant HD-073288 (Julie A. Van Dyke, PI), the Ontario Early Researcher award (Kuperman, PI), the Canada Research Chair (Tier 2; Kuperman, PI), the SSHRC Partnership Training Grant 895-2016-1008 (Libben, PI), and the NSERC USRA scholarship to the first author. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health or the Canadian government. This work has been presented at the 10th International Mental Lexicon meeting (2016, Ottawa, Canada).

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Notes

¹ We thank an anonymous reviewer for raising and elaborating on this point.

² A similar lexical decision megastudy (the British Lexicon Project; Keuleers, Lacey, Rastle, & Brysbaert, 2012) only contained 43 of our 68 target words, and so we did not analyze this additional data set.

³ Lexical decision makes use of nonwords; however, none of these were homophonic with existing words of the English language (Balota et al., 2007).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the following research grants: the Canadian NSERC Discovery grant RGPIN/402395-2012 (Kuperman, PI), the National Institutes of Health R01 grant HD-073288 (Julie A. Van Dyke, PI), the Ontario Early Researcher award (Kuperman, PI), the Canada Research Chair (Tier 2; Kuperman, PI), the SSHRC Partnership Training Grant 895-2016-1008 (Libben, PI), and the NSERC USRA scholarship to the first author. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health or the Canadian government. This work has been presented at the 10th International Mental Lexicon meeting (2016, Ottawa, Canada).