Spelling tests have begun to be used as a factor to assess reading skill and literacy. Examining spelling errors from these tests can provide insight about the components of the long-term memory representations of word spellings and overall lexical expertise. This study investigates spelling errors to analyze sound-letter mappings during spelling to find patterns of error. These patterns of sound-letter mapping errors identify mappings that are difficult to learn and spell. Participants were given a spelling recall test, where they were asked to write the correct spelling of a spoken word. We analyzed the misspelled words and determined if they were phonologically plausible or not and whether errors follow the orthographic rules of English. We further characterized four types of letter errors: additions, deletions, transpositions, and substitutions. Substitutions were further categorized into four categories, identifying what had been substituted and for what: vowel substitution for another vowel, vowel substituted for consonant, consonant substituted for vowel, or consonant substituted for another consonant. We evaluated the error patterns in terms of the nature of spelling representations, and what parts of the words are easier to learn than others. The idea that some parts of a spelling representation may be more easily learned or remembered than others is referred to as orthographic texture (Canda & Folk, 2019; Jones, Folk, & Rapp, 2009). The error patterns provide insight into how spellers learn sound-letter associations.
- Author:
-
- Format:
-
|
Readers learn much of their vocabulary through incidental exposure during reading. Learning a novel vocabulary word includes learning its meaning (semantics), spelling (orthography), and pronunciation (phonology). Much of the previous research has focused on how readers learn the meanings of novel words incidentally (e.g., Bolger, Balass, Landen, & Perfetti, 2008; Frishkoff, Perfetti, & Collins-Thompson, 2010; Frishkoff, Perfetti, & Westbury, 2009). Overall, these studies have found that learning a word’s spelling is related to learning its meaning. These findings indicate that learning the meaning of a word is improved when both meaning and spelling are learned together. However, less research has investigated the learning of a novel word’s form (orthography and phonology), particularly how the learning of a word’s meaning influences the learning of its form. The current study investigated this relationship between orthography and semantics, and their interaction when learning novel words. Sixteen novel words were embedded in three informative or uninformative sentence contexts; the context occurred immediately before the target word. Participants read these sentences silently for comprehension while their eye-movements were monitored. Immediately after the reading session, participants completed surprise spelling and meaning posttests to measure their word learning. Results indicate that orthographic and semantic learning are correlated such that learning one is related to improved learning of the other. These findings suggest that learning semantics and orthography independently may not be the best way to learn novel words, and they have implications for theories of individual differences in reading comprehension.
- Author:
-
- Format:
-
|
