Phonology Contrains the Internal Orthographic Representation

• Published in: Reading & writing Vol. 14; no. 3-4; pp. 297 - 332
• Main Authors: Katz, Leonard, Frost, Stephen J
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 01.06.2001
• ISSN: 0922-4777

Four experiments explored the composition & stability of internal orthographic representations of printed words. In three experiments, subjects were presented on successive occasions with words that were consistently spelled correctly or were consistently misspelled. On the second presentation, subjects were more likely to judge both kinds of words as correctly spelled than on the first presentation, suggesting that their pre-experimental orthographic representations had been altered to match what they had seen on the first presentation. However, only misspellings that were consistent with the correct phonology were accepted; spellings that altered the phonology were rarely accepted, suggesting that some parts of the orthographic representation are less stable than others. Also, subjects' reliance on orthographic vs phonological memory when judging a word's spelling was affected by the kinds of other misspellings in the list. Lists that contained some phonologically implausible spellings for real words (eg, *assostance) induced subjects to rely more on phonological plausibility when judging the correctness of other words in the list & less on orthographic memory. An individual grapheme in an internal orthographic representation was unstable when there were many phonologically acceptable alternatives for it. The results are contrary to the view that the strength of an internal representation is uniform across all its graphemes & is a function only of visual experience with the printed form. Results were interpreted in the context of a theory that considers spelling knowledge to be a by-product of the reading process, a process that involves phonological analysis. 1 Table, 5 Figures, 2 Appendixes, 36 References. Adapted from the source document