Learning to spell from reading: General knowledge about spelling patterns influences memory for specific words

Abstract

Adults often learn to spell words during the course of reading for meaning, without intending to do so. We used an incidental learning task in order to study this process. Spellings that contained double n, r and t which are common doublets in French, were learned more readily by French university students than spellings that contained less common but still legal doublets. When recalling or recognizing the latter, the students sometimes made transposition errors, doubling a consonant that often doubles in French rather than the consonant that was originally doubled (e.g., tiddunar recalled as tidunnar). The results, found in three experiments using different nonwords and different types of instructions, show that people use general knowledge about the graphotactic patterns of their writing system together with word-specific knowledge to reconstruct spellings that they learn from reading. These processes contribute to failures and successes in memory for spellings, as in other domains.

Keywords:

• Spelling
• Graphotactic regularities
• Implicit learning
• Double letters.

This work was supported by grants from Université Paris Descartes, Université Blaise Pascal, Université Lumière Lyon 2, the Centre National pour la Recherche (CNRS), Institut Universitaire de France, and Agence Nationale pour la Recherche (grant APPORTHO).

Notes

¹An ANOVA on the number of correct spellings with the variables of experiment (1, 2, and 3) and item type (no, frequent, and rare doublet) using subjects as random variables revealed main effects of experiment and item type and an interaction between experiment and item type (Fs > 4.55, ps > .001). The interaction reflected the fact that correct spellings varied as a function of experiment for frequent- and rare-doublet items (Fs > 13.73, ps > .001) but not for no-doublet items (ps > .36). For both frequent- and rare-doublet items, planned comparisons showed that correct spellings were more common in Experiment 1 than in Experiments 2 and 3 (Fs > 23.72, ps > .001), with no difference between Experiments 2 and 3 (ps > .22).