Are some morphological units more prone to spelling variation than others? A case study using spontaneous handwritten data

Abstract

The relation between morphology and spelling is an important source of evidence for theories of linguistic processing. In particular, spelling errors can help us assess the role of morphological structure in language users’ mental representations of words in authentic texts. Previous research suggests that some morphological units are more prone to spelling errors than others, partly depending on the degree to which they are perceived as separate units. In this paper, we want to test this hypothesis by exploring graphemic variation in a collection of 1,667 German school-exit exams. Specifically, we code the spelling errors for their morphological structure. We can show that inflectional suffixes show a much higher probability of final letter omissions compared to final stems or derivational suffixes. We also find tentative evidence that case markers are more often affected by omissions than number markers.