Skilled readers’ sensitivity to meaningful regularities in English writing

Ulicheva, Anastasia; Harvey, Hannah; Aronoff, Mark; Rastle, Kathleen

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2018.09.013

Cited by 55 publications

(63 citation statements)

References 47 publications

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“…In many Indo-European languages with concatenative morphology, sound-to-meaning mappings of morphologically complex words are typically less consistent than spelling-tomeaning mappings (e.g., Berg & Aronoff, 2017;Berg, Buchmann, Dybiec, & Fuhrhop, 2014;Rastle, 2018;Ulicheva, Harvey, Aronoff, & Rastle, 2018). For instance, in spoken English, the past tense is usually denoted by the allomorphs /əd/, /d/, or /t/ depending on surrounding context (e.g., busted, snored, kicked), whereas in written English, the corresponding phonemic sequences are always spelled ed (e.g., Carney, 1994;Desrochers, Manolitsis, Gaudreau, & Georgiou, 2017;Rastle, 2018).…”

Section: Morphological Processing Across Modalitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Morphological Processing across Modalities and Languages

Beyersmann

Mousikou

Javourey-Drevet

et al. 2020

Scientific Studies of Reading

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The present study examined cross-linguistic differences in morphological processing in the visual and auditory modality. French and German adults performed a visual and auditory lexical decision task that involved the same translation-equivalent items. The focus of the study was on nonwords, which were constructed in a way that the independent role of stems and suffixes in visual and auditory processing could be investigated. Results revealed a stem-by-modality and a suffix-by-modality interaction, indicating a more prominent role for morphology in the visual than in the auditory domain. Moreover, a significant language-by-stem interaction indicated more robust morphological processing in German than in French. The latter result supports the idea that morphological processing is influenced by the morphological productivity of a language.

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Section: Morphological Processing Across Modalitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Morphological Processing across Modalities and Languages

Beyersmann

Mousikou

Javourey-Drevet

et al. 2020

Scientific Studies of Reading

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“…Therefore, it is important to look at more implicit rules that are less likely to be addressed explicitly in the spelling acquisition process: Morpho-graphic spelling of derivational suffixes in adults who have fully acquired the English spelling system. This is what Ulicheva et al (2020) did, testing whether skilled readers make use of morpho-graphic spelling regularities to induce the grammatical category of novel words, both in comprehension and production. In a categorisation task, they showed that participants were more likely to classify novel words with suffixes that are diagnostic of adjectives (e.g., -able, -ous and -less in gufable, raxous and jevless) as such, while novel words with nominal suffixes (e.g., -ment, -an and -er in vixment, dofan and jumer) were rather marked as representing nouns, suggesting that skilled readers' comprehension of novel words is aided by morphological information encoded in affixes with highly reliable spellings.…”

mentioning

confidence: 93%

“…(4) In order to increase power, only one affix was investigated, namely -ous. This affix was selected because it is highly indicative of adjectivehood (see Berg and Aronoff 2017) and yielded the clearest differentiation between congruent (ADJ) and incongruent (N) contexts in Ulicheva et al (2020).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Below the surface: The application of implicit morpho-graphic regularities to novel word spelling

Heyer

2020

Morphology

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Previous corpus studies have shown that the English spelling system is ‘morpho-graphic’ (Berg and Aronoff 2017) in that affixes are spelt in a consistent way (e.g., ‹ous› in famous) that distinguishes them from homophonous word endings without grammatical function (e.g., ‹us› in bonus). The present paper investigates if English spellers apply these regularities to the spelling of novel words implicitly and whether the application of those regularities is modulated by experience with the English writing system. Participants with varying degrees of expertise in the English writing system were asked to spell novel words ending in /əs/, which were presented orally in either an adjective context (i.e., biasing towards the affix spelling ‹ous›) or a noun context (i.e., biasing towards an alternative spelling such as ‹us›). The results showed that the adjective context elicited significantly more ‹ous› spellings than the noun context, indicating that participants applied morpho-graphic spelling regularities to novel words to mark the appropriate lexical category. Additionally, there was a modulation by spelling ability: The higher participants’ expertise in the English spelling system was, the more novel words they spelt according to morpho-graphic spelling regularities. In conclusion, English spellers are aware of the morpho-graphic spelling regularities without explicit instruction and apply these to novel words. They gradually induce the regularities from the input, which results in more robust rule application with increased experience and expertise in the English writing system.

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“…Recent computational work demonstrates that this strong relationship between suffix spelling and grammatical class is a general principle of English suffixation (Ulicheva, Harvey, Aronoff, & Rastle, 2018). Ulicheva et al (2018) studied the relationship between suffix spelling and grammatical class for more than 150 English suffixes; this relationship is visualised in Figure 1 for two suffixes. The first example shows that there are many possible spellings of the word-final sound sequence /lәs/ (e.g., [-lace], [-less], [-liss]).…”

Section: The Information In English Writingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Indeed, I would argue that the closer a writing system gets to a one-to-one mapping between spelling and sound, the less scope there is for highly reliable morphological cues to arise in the spelling, unless particular sound sequences themselves are reserved to communicate meaningful morphological information. However, this proposal is speculative; moving forward towards a more general understanding of how writing systems balance spelling-sound and spelling-meaning information will require much more detailed analyses of contrasting writing systems along the lines of those undertaken by Ulicheva et al (2018). More broadly, it seems almost inconceivable that the trajectory of reading acquisition, and the nature of representations characterising skilled reading, would not be substantially influenced by the nature of the information being learned (see also Frost, 2012).…”

Section: The Information In English Writingmentioning

confidence: 99%

EPS mid-career prize lecture 2017: Writing systems, reading, and language

Rastle

2019

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

Self Cite

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Skilled reading reflects an accumulation of experience with written language. Written language is typically viewed as an expression of spoken language, and this perspective has motivated approaches to understanding reading and reading acquisition. However, in this article, I develop the proposal that written language has diverged from spoken language in important ways that maximise the transmission of meaningful information, and that this divergence has been central to the development of rapid, skilled reading. I use English as an example to show that weaknesses in the relationship between spelling and sound can give rise to strong regularities between spelling and meaning that are critical for the rapid analysis of printed words. I conclude by arguing that the nature of the reading system is a reflection of the writing system and that a deep understanding of reading can be obtained only through a deep understanding of written language.

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Skilled readers’ sensitivity to meaningful regularities in English writing

Cited by 55 publications

References 47 publications

Morphological Processing across Modalities and Languages

Morphological Processing across Modalities and Languages

Below the surface: The application of implicit morpho-graphic regularities to novel word spelling

EPS mid-career prize lecture 2017: Writing systems, reading, and language

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