Orthographic Expectancies in the Absence of Contextual Support

ABSTRACT

Purpose

Readers can draw on their knowledge of sound-to-letter mappings to form expectations about the spellings of known spoken words prior to seeing them in written sentences. The current study asked whether such orthographic expectancies are observed in the absence of contextual support at the point of reading.

Method

Seventy-eight adults received oral vocabulary training on 16 novel words over two days, while another set of 16 items was untrained. Following training, participants saw both trained and untrained novel words in print for the first time within a lexical recognition task. Half of the items had spellings that were predictable from their pronunciations (e.g., nesh), while the remainder had spellings that were less predictable from their pronunciations (e.g., koyb).

Results

Participants were able to recognize newly learned words, and lexical recognition latencies displayed clear evidence of orthographic expectancies, as evidenced by a larger effect of spelling predictability for orally trained than untrained items.

Conclusion

These data are consistent with the emergence of orthographic expectancies even when written words are first encountered in isolation.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Erik D. Reichle for his comments on an earlier version of this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Please see the supplementary material for an additional exploratory analysis.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a grant from the Australian Research Council [grant number DP200100311] to A. C., K. N. & E. B.