Sensitivity to meaningful regularities acquired through experience

Abstract

English spelling provides multiple cues to word meaning, and these cues are readily exploited by skilled readers. In two crowdsourcing studies, we tested skilled readers’ sensitivity to a large number of morphological as well as nonmorphological orthographic cues by asking them to classify nonwords as adjectives or nouns. We observed a substantial variability across individuals and orthographic cues. In this paper, we discuss some sources of this variation. Specifically, we found consistent correlations between readers’ sensitivity to cues and their performance on language tasks (reading, spelling, and author recognition tests) suggesting that reading experience is critical for assimilating spelling-to-meaning regularity from written language. Further, we identified characteristics that may be important for the learning and exploitation of orthographic cues that are related to the nature of their function and use in context.