Phonological and graphotactic influences on spellers’ decisions about consonant doubling

Abstract

Even adults sometimes have difficulty choosing between single- and double-letter spellings, as in spinet versus spinnet. The present study examined the phonological and graphotactic factors that influence adults' use of single versus double medial consonants in the spelling of nonwords. We tested 111 adults from a community sample who varied widely in spelling ability. Better spellers were more affected than less good spellers by phonological context in that they were more likely to double consonants after short vowels and less likely to double consonants after long vowels. Although descriptions of the English writing system focus on the role of phonology in determining use of single versus double consonants, participants were also influenced by graphotactic context. There was an effect of preceding graphotactic context, such that spellers were less likely to use a double consonant when they spelled the preceding vowel with more than one letter than when they spelled it with one letter. There was also an effect of following graphotactic context, such that doubling rate varied with the letters that the participant used at the end of the nonword. These graphotactic influences did not differ significantly in strength across the range of spelling ability in our study. Discussion focuses on the role of statistical learning in the learning of spelling patterns, especially those patterns that are not explicitly taught.

Statistical and explicit learning of graphotactic patterns with no phonological counterpart: Evidence from an artificial lexicon study with 6–7-year-olds and adults

“…Thus, the graphotactic pattern influenced children's performance above and beyond the phonology. This has been since also shown with adults using both monosyllabic and disyllabic stimuli (Treiman & Kessler, 2015;Treiman & Wolter, 2018).…”

Word class and spelling in English.

“…When choosing between single and double consonants, as when choosing between other spelling alternatives, experienced spellers take advantage of the regularities that their writing system offers. The position of a consonant (e.g., word-initial or word-final) and the nature of the adjacent segments (e.g., a preceding short vowel, as in ‹comma›, or a preceding long vowel, as in ‹coma›) provide clues as to whether the consonant should be spelled with a single or a double letter, and spellers benefit from these cues (e.g., Cassar & Treiman, 1997; Pacton, Borchardt, Treiman, Lété, & Fayol, 2014; Sobaco, Treiman, Peereman, Borchardt, & Pacton, 2015; Treiman & Wolter, 2018; Yin, Joshi, Li, & Kim, 2020). The present findings show that experienced spellers of English also consider word class when choosing between single consonants and geminates.…”

The making of the Litkey Corpus, a richly annotated longitudinal corpus of German texts written by primary school children

“…Such cues are likely to be of a statistical nature, such as bigram frequencies or syllable frequencies or orthographic consistency. Experimental studies (e.g., de Bree et al, 2018;Treiman and Wolter, 2018) suggest that implicit cues have a substantial impact on the acquisition of vowel spellings and double consonant spellings.…”