The locus of word frequency effects in skilled spelling-to-dictation

Abstract

In spelling-to-dictation tasks, skilled spellers consistently initiate spelling of high-frequency words faster than that of low-frequency words. Tainturier and Rapp's model of spelling shows three possible loci for this frequency effect: spoken word recognition, orthographic retrieval, and response execution of the first letter. Thus far, researchers have attributed the effect solely to orthographic retrieval without considering spoken word recognition or response execution. To investigate word frequency effects at each of these three loci, Experiment 1 involved a delayed spelling-to-dictation task and Experiment 2 involved a delayed/uncertain task. In Experiment 1, no frequency effect was found in the 1200-ms delayed condition, suggesting that response execution is not affected by word frequency. In Experiment 2, no frequency effect was found in the delayed/uncertain task that reflects the orthographic retrieval, whereas a frequency effect was found in the comparison immediate/uncertain task that reflects both spoken word recognition and orthographic retrieval. The results of this two-part study suggest that frequency effects in spoken word recognition play a substantial role in skilled spelling-to-dictation. Discrepancies between these findings and previous research, and the limitations of the present study, are discussed.

Keywords:

• Spelling-to-dictation
• Word frequency
• Spoken word recognition
• Orthographic retrieval
• Response execution

We thank Melvin Yap and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on previous versions of this article.

This research was funded by the National University of Singapore's Graduate Research Scholarship awarded to the first author.

Notes

1 For example, she spelled “cabin” as “cabinet”, “hammer” as “humble”, “doctrine” as “doctoral”, “acclaim” as “accumulate”, “entice” as “tantalise”, “tulip” as “chili”, “concise” as “consistent”, and so on.

2 The imageability rating of 78 words not found in Schock, Cortese, and Khanna (2012) was provided by 32 English speakers not involved in any of the spelling experiments.

3 The immediate condition (0-ms delay), in which participants started typing immediately at the offset of the spoken words differed from the normal spelling-to-dictation in the previous studies (e.g., Bonin et al., 1998; Bonin, Peereman, & Fayol, 2001; Bonin & Meot, 2002) where participants could start writing upon the onset of the spoken words. This modification was important because it ensured that the cue always occurred after the spoken words across all the delayed conditions, thereby reducing any confusion that could have arisen from the different temporal organization of the cue and the spoken word.

4 Another analysis with a more stringent exclusion criterion was also conducted such that trials in which participants used backspace to correct their typing of any letter were also excluded. This stringent criterion was imposed because the latency used to type the first letter of a mistyped response that was corrected might not be a valid indication of how a correct spelling is achieved. This exclusion of corrected trials was also employed by Bonin et al. (1998) who did not allow correction of spelling errors. Nonetheless, the result of this analysis was found to be in the same pattern as the analysis of the less stringent criteria reported here.

5 An ANOVA to investigate the interaction between delay and experiment was not possible because the delay was a within-subject factor in Experiment 1 but a between-subject factor in Experiment 2. The degrees of freedom are not reported here because they are debatable, and the statistical packages—that is, lme4 and LanguageR package in R—that we used did not provide the degree of freedom. The package runs a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation. Interested readers can refer to Baayen, Davidson, and Bates (2008).