Learning to Spell Novel Words: The Relationship Between Orthographic and Semantic Representations During Incidental Learning

Long, Shauna P. A. de; Folk, Jocelyn R.

doi:10.1007/s10936-022-09886-4

Cited by 1 publication

(2 citation statements)

References 28 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…According to us, tasks assessing semantic learning with an orthographic cue could thus lead to overestimating the effect of orthography on semantic learning. It is also interesting to point out that this overestimation could explain, at least partly, the association between semantic and orthographic learning observed in word-learning studies at the item-level (de Long & Folk, 2022;Eskenazi et al, 2018;Smejkalova & Chetail, 2023a). This observation calls for the development of novel tasks that better assess semantic learning so that we could understand how orthography interacts with meaning acquisition without such task-dependent confounds.…”

Section: Semantic Learningmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Interestingly, studies that jointly examined the outcomes of semantic and orthographic learning reported an association between meaning and spelling in recall accuracy at the item level. This suggests that producing or recognizing the correct spelling of a novel word increases the probability of recalling its definition or recognizing its meaning among several distractors (de Long & Folk, 2022; Smejkalova & Chetail, 2023a). In everyday life, readers are exposed to variable contexts when encountering new words, and the complete word-specific information, encompassing its orthography and semantics, is not always available.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Learning Spelling From Meaning

Smejkalova,

Chetail

2023

Experimental Psychology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Abstract. According to the instance-based approach, each novel word encounter is encoded as an episodic trace, including different aspects of word knowledge (orthography, semantics, phonology) and context. Experiencing the novel word again leads to reactivating the previous instances to support word identification. Accordingly, once a link between orthography and meaning is established through several instances of co-occurrence, presenting the novel word form enhances semantic learning even if the contexts are uninformative about the meaning ( Eskenazi et al., 2018 ). Here, we investigated whether informative contexts enhance orthographic learning in the absence of the novel word form. Participants read pseudowords in three definition-like sentences, followed by three unrelated filler sentences (baseline condition), three uninformative sentences (orthographic condition), or three informative sentences with synonyms replacing the pseudoword (semantic condition). After reading, participants were better at spelling pseudowords exposed in the semantic than in the baseline condition and recalled more definitions of the pseudowords exposed in the orthographic than in the baseline condition. Such results indicate that both semantic and orthographic learning benefit from the contexts where the target information is absent. Overall, this supports the instance-based approach and contributes to the understanding of the interplay between orthography and semantics in contextual word learning.

show abstract

Section: Semantic Learningmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%