Does exposure to orthography affect children's spelling accuracy?

Abstract

It has previously been reported that exposure to visually presented correctly and incorrectly spelled words has a significant effect on subsequent spelling accuracy. Previous research investigating this process in skilled adult readers has shown very robust effects that encountering a misspelling has a detrimental effect on spelling accuracy whereas encountering a correct spelling has a beneficial effect. This effect is considered to be mediated via an implicit priming mechanism. In the current study, children with a mean age of 10 years were tested using a similar procedure to the experiments with adults but the results revealed a qualitatively different pattern. Children showed a significant beneficial effect following presentation of a correct spelling but no measurable effect of encountering a misspelling on subsequent spelling accuracy. The fact that children's spelling output was also found to be affected by depth of encoding at the point of presentation points towards an explanation of children using explicit rather than implicit processing of prior information.