The purpose of this study was to document the impact of an instructional approach, Word Study, on adults’ spelling and reading. Forty-nine adults enrolled in ESL classes at a community-based site in the United States from January through May and were tested on the Comprehensive Adult Student Assessment System, the Elementary Spelling Inventory and the Developmental Spelling Analysis. This study...

To be able to use existing natural language processing tools for analysing historical text, an important preprocessing step is spelling normalisation, converting the original spelling to present-day spelling, before applying tools such as taggers and parsers. In this paper, we compare a probablistic, language-independent approach to spelling normalisation based on statistical machine translatio...

An overview of the goals of English orthography counters the misconception that its spelling is chaotic and unprincipled. Direct representation of the speaker’s phonemes is not its only goal. But even the sound-to-letter correspondences are not as inconsistent as widely believed. A survey of first-grade text vocabulary shows that spelling consistency is increased significantly if one takes into...

This paper introduces an overview of Chinese Spelling Check task at SIGHAN Bake-off 2013. We describe all aspects of the task for Chinese spelling check, consisting of task description, data preparation, performance metrics, and evaluation results. This bake-off contains two subtasks, i.e., error detection and error correction. We evaluate the systems that can automatically point out the spelli...

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...

Previous fMRI studies in English-speaking samples suggested that specific interventions may alter brain function in language-relevant networks in children with reading and spelling difficulties, but this research strongly focused on reading impaired individuals. Only few studies so far investigated characteristics of brain activation associated with poor spelling ability and whether a specific ...

There has been less research on how children learn to spell than on how they learn to read, but a good deal is now known about spelling development. This article reviews studies of normative development, beginning with children’s early scribbles and proceeding to prephonological spelling involving letters, phonologically influenced invented spelling, and more advanced spelling. Most of the stud...

Prior research has purported to show that words with infrequent phoneme-grapheme correspondences are more difficult to spell than words with frequent phoneme-grapheme correspondences. Defining exactly what a phoneme-grapheme relationship is, however, is not necessarily straightforward. There are a number of different assumptions that can be made. In this study, we developed four metrics of soun...

English spelling is highly inconsistent in terms of simple sound-to-spelling correspondences, but is more consistent when context is taken into account. For example, the choice between ch and tch is determined by the preceding vowel (coach, roach vs. catch, hatch). We investigated children’s sensitivity to vowel context when spelling consonants in monosyllabic nonwords. Children in grade two (s...

We examined the spelling acquisition in children up to late primary school of a consistent orthography (Italian) and an inconsistent orthography (English). The effects of frequency, lexicality, length, and regularity in modulating spelling performance of the two groups were examined. English and Italian children were matched for both chronological age and number of years of schooling. Two-hundr...