The Psycholinguistics of Spelling: Phonology and Beyond

Abstract

Spelling, up to recent times, was a topic best relegated to school curricula. But a growing number of psychologists and linguists have established the study of spelling and its acquisition as a mainstream psycholinguistic domain of inquiry. A major source of spelling comes from homophony , a challenge aided by achieving knowledge system which relies on mining patterns and generalizations from a vast amount of spoken and written language data. Correct spelling is thus enabled by achieving coherent and stable representations of orthographic and linguistic segments and establishing clear and consistent pathways linking them. Two major premises underlie this account: one, the linguistic nature of spelling and its acquisition; and two, how typology impacts on the way spelling is learned in different languages. In linguistics, I am committed to the schools of cognitive and functional linguistics; From a psycholinguistic perspective, my theoretical stance belongs with statistical-learning, connectionist and constructivist approaches to language acquisition and processing, which view categories of knowledge as emerging from the interface of constantly changing general learning mechanisms with incoming input. Three knowledge domains are necessary to spelling acquisition in a particular language – phonology, grammar, and orthography. The typological traits of the language and the orthographic system being learnt determine the differential prominence of each of the three domains.