Two studies of Grade I reading interventionsforEnglish-language (EL) learners at riskfor readingproblems were conducted. Two samples of EL students were randomly assigned to a treatment or untreated comparison group on the basis of their language of instructionfor core reading (i.e., Spanish or English). In all, 91 students completed the English study (43 treatment and 48 comparison), and 80 st...

This study aims to discuss general issues related to the difference in spelling between British and American English. It makes use of a small-scale survey of 160 university students in Northern Thailand as an initial source of orthographic variation existing in a new generation. Then, the discussion focuses on wider implications of spelling differences and plausible impacts on digitized texts, ...

Spelling issues tend to create relatively minor (though still complex) problems for corpus linguistics, information retrieval and natural language processing tasks that use ‘standard’ or modern varieties of English. For example, in corpus annotation, we have to decide how to deal with tokenisation issues such as whether (i) periods represent sentence boundaries or acronyms and (ii) apostrophes ...

In this article, the author explores why and how of differences in spelling words among English-speaking countries.

Although English lacks 1-to-1 relationships between sounds and spellings, considering the context in which a phoneme occurs can often aid in selecting a spelling. For example, /ɑ/ is typically spelled as a when it follows /w/, as in wand, but as o when it follows other consonants, as in pond. In 2 experiments, the authors asked whether children’s spellings of vowels in nonwords were affected by...

In this paper we describe a connectionist model of the development of alphabetic spelling, and show that its performance resembles that of dyslexic spellers if its computational resources are restricted during learning. We then describe the results of an experiment which tests the predictions of the model on normal and dyslexic spellers. Our results suggest that dyslexic children show a similar...

Although English lacks one-to-one relationships between sounds and spellings, considering the context in which a phoneme occurs can often aid in selecting a spelling. For example, /ɑ/ is typically spelled as a when it follows /w/, as in wand, but as o when it follows other consonants, as in pond. In two experiments, we asked whether children’s spellings of vowels in nonwords were affected by th...

This study examined the effect of dialect variation on children’s spelling by using devoicing of final /d/ in African American Vernacular English (AAVE) as a test case. In line with the linguistic interference hypothesis, African American 6-year-olds were significantly poorer at spelling the final d of words such as salad than non-African American students after their spelling performance on ot...

Chinese spelling check is an important component for many NLP applications, including word processor and search engines. However, compared to checkers for alphabetical languages (e.g., English or French), Chinese spelling checkers are more difficult to develop, because there are no word boundaries in Chinese writing system, and errors may be caused by various Chinese input methods. In this pape...