Kemp, Nenagh, Hollie Blackley, Imogen Cure, Rebecca Treiman & Brett Kessler. 2012, July. Spelling pseudowords: The effects of task instructions and wordlikeness. Paper presented at the meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading (SSSR), Montréal, Canada.

Abstract

Purpose

Researchers often test spellers’ sensitivity to spelling patterns by asking them to spell pseudowords. Because words from different sources vary in their spelling patterns, we hypothesized that participants’ spelling of targeted sounds might vary depending on how strongly context suggests typical English provenance. We tested two types of context: experiment instructions and the phonotactic typicality of nontargeted parts of words.

Method

In Study 1, 151 adults and children wrote 60 pseudowords: 20 presented as real English words, 20 as made-up words, and 20 as monster names. In Study 2, 84 adults and children wrote 64 pseudowords, half with typical clusters like /sp/ and half with infrequent clusters like /θp/ (thp). We counted how often targeted sounds were spelled with their most common representation in each condition.

Results

Study 1 presentation conditions made no significant difference to adults’ or children’s spelling of the target sounds. In Study 2, adults, but not children, used less common spellings, such as ‹ph› for /f/, 7% more often in pseudowords that contained less typically English clusters, such as /θp/, in other parts of the word.

Conclusions

We found no evidence that commonly used task instructions make much difference in how participants spell pseudowords, even if stimuli were presented as fabrications. However, adults spelled targeted sounds differently depending on how typically English the rest of the word was. This has implications for the construction of pseudowords in experiments and for our understanding of contextual effects in spelling.

APA citation:

Kemp, N., Blackley, H., Cure, I., Treiman, R., & Kessler, B. 2012, July. Spelling pseudowords: The effects of task instructions and wordlikeness. Paper presented at the meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading, Montréal, Canada.