Abstract
We investigated the combined contributions of multiple mechanisms that have been previously indicated to underlie the lexical system’s influence on the spelling of unfamiliar words. In two lexical priming studies we presented lists of words and nonwords aurally for participants to spell only the nonwords. Word primes that rhymed with the target nonwords immediately preceded the nonwords (Experiment 1) or there were two intervening items between the prime word and target nonword (Experiment 2). We found that prime words influenced nonword spellings even across intervening items, suggesting that the presentation of a real word may temporarily re-weight sublexical sound-to-spelling correspondences. Importantly, word neighbors were also found to influence nonword spelling, even in the absence of a prime word. Our data provide evidence of the operation of multiple mechanisms that underlie the lexical system’s influence on the sublexical system during the spelling of unfamiliar words (or nonwords).
Highlights
There have been many studies indicating that the spellings produced for unfamiliar words can be influenced by the spellings of familiar words [1,2,3,4,5]
For all lists used in the experiment, each set of 24 target nonword items was divided into 4 groups according to all four possible combinations of mean summed frequency of friends and enemies: “high enemies/high friends” (HE-HF), “high enemies/low friends” (HE-LF) “low enemies/high friends” (LE-HF), and “low enemies/low friends” (LE-LF)
In Experiment 2 when there were two intervening words presented between the prime word and target nonword, we found that the prior presentation of a rhyming word prime influenced the subsequent spelling of a nonword
Summary
There have been many studies indicating that the spellings produced for unfamiliar words can be influenced by the spellings of familiar words [1,2,3,4,5]. The goal of the current study was to investigate the underlying mechanisms involved in spelling unfamiliar words, focusing on the multiple ways in which the spellings of familiar words influence the process of spelling unfamiliar words. Most theories of spelling include two processes involved in the spelling of familiar and unfamiliar words: the lexical and sublexical processes [6,7,8,9,10,11]. When an unfamiliar word is presented, these theories assume that the sublexical process assembles a spelling based on sound-to-letter correspondences [8]. These correspondences, or phoneme-grapheme (P-G) probabilities, indicate the likelihood of assigning one or more letters for a given sound based on a person’s experience with a language
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