Measuring Lexical Quality: The Role of Spelling Ability

Abstract

The construct of 'lexical quality' (Perfetti Scientific Studies of Reading 11, 357-383, 2007) is widely invoked in literature on word recognition and reading to refer to a systematic dimension of individual differences that predicts performance in a range of word identification and reading tasks in both developing readers and skilled adult populations. Many different approaches have been used to assess lexical quality, but few have captured the orthographic precision that is central to the construct. This paper describes, evaluates, and disseminates spelling dictation and spelling recognition tests that were developed to provide sensitive measures of the precision component of lexical quality in skilled college student readersthe population that has provided most of the benchmark data for models of word recognition and reading. Analyses are reported for 785 students who completed the spelling tests in conjunction with standardized measures of reading comprehension, vocabulary, and reading speed, of whom 107 also completed author recognition and phonemic decoding tests. Internal consistency analyses showed that both spelling tests were relatively unidimensional and displayed good internal consistency, although the recognition test contained too many easy items. Item-level analyses are included to provide the basis for further refinement of these instruments. The spelling tests were moderately correlated with the other measures of written language proficiency, but factor analyses revealed that they consistently defined a separate component, demonstrating that they tap a dimension of variability that is partially independent of variance in reading comprehension, speed, and vocabulary. These components appear to align with the precision and coherence dimensions of lexical quality. Keywords Reading ability . spelling ability . individual differences . lexical quality hypothesis This paper has both practical and theoretical goals. The major practical goal is to validate and disseminate two measures of spelling ability that were developed to discriminate among samples of skilled, native English-speaking university students. Although other measures of spelling ability are available in batteries such as the Wide Range Achievement Tests (Wilkinson & Robertson, 2017), they were not specifically developed for university student populations. This may, in part, account for why spelling ability has received little attention in the literature on individual differences among skilled readers relative to measures of word and nonword reading (e.g., Kuperman & Van Dyke, 2011), reading speed (e.g.,

Spelling ability influences early letter encoding during reading: Evidence from return-sweep eye movements

“…Typically, reading ability is assessed using the reading comprehension subtest of the Nelson–Denny (Brown et al, 1993). While Andrews et al (2020) report that reading rate yields weaker correlations with spelling ability than comprehension performance on the Nelson–Denny, the correlation between effective reading rate (which combines comprehension and reading rate) and spelling ability in the current study is in line with other eye movement experiments (as discussed in the “Results” section).…”

Wrapping up Sentence Comprehension: The Role of Task Demands and Individual Differences

“…To evaluate whether the impact of comprehension load was moderated by reading skill, a composite index of reading proficiency was constructed by combining vocabulary, comprehension, and reading rate scores from the Nelson-Denny Reading Test (Brown, Fishco, & Hanna, 1993) with two measures of spelling ability (Andrews, Veldre, & Clarke, 2020) that have been shown to assess the orthographic precision component of lexical quality (Andrews, 2015;Perfetti, 2007).…”

“…Participants' vocabulary, passage comprehension, and reading speed were assessed with the Nelson-Denny Reading Test. 2 Participants also completed a 20-item spelling dictation test and an 88-item spelling recognition test (see Andrews et al, 2020).…”

“…The standard time limits for the vocabulary and passage comprehension tests were reduced by half (to 7.5 and 10 minutes, respectively) because these shorter time limits yield a more normal distribution of test scores in university student samples like that tested here(Andrews et al, 2020).…”

The Effects of Orthographic Neighborhood Size and the Influence of Individual Differences in Linguistic Skills During the Recognition of Chinese Words

“…The analysis of NS and WF effects focuses on the influence of lexical properties on word recognition. On the other hand, some researches of alphabetic languages found that individual differences in readers’ linguistic skills also affect word recognition ( Kuperman and Van Dyke, 2011 ; Veldre and Andrews, 2015a , b ; Andrews et al, 2020 ). For instance, compared to readers with average linguistic skills, those with high linguistic skills show shorter gaze time in recognizing targets ( Haenggi and Perfetti, 1994 ; Ashby et al, 2005 ) and more automatic retrieval ( Laberge and Samuels, 1974 ; Andrews, 2008 ; Kuperman and Van Dyke, 2011 , 2013 ).…”