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Assessing spelling strategies for the orthography of Dutch verbs
Author(s) -
Assink Egbert M. H.
Publication year - 1985
Publication title -
british journal of psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.536
H-Index - 92
eISSN - 2044-8295
pISSN - 0007-1269
DOI - 10.1111/j.2044-8295.1985.tb01958.x
Subject(s) - participle , homophone , orthography , linguistics , psychology , spelling , past tense , pronunciation , prefix , verb , context (archaeology) , present tense , psycholinguistics , cognition , reading (process) , paleontology , philosophy , neuroscience , biology
Homophone orthography problems form the hard core of spelling difficulties in any language with an alphabetic writing system. For that reason they constitute most interesting material for experiments exploring individual differences in the use of spelling strategies. A total of 253 subjects participated in an experiment with a notoriously difficult homophone problem: the orthography of weak prefix verbs in Dutch. The characteristic difficulty of this category of verbs is that, contrary to the general rule, the present tense singular and past participle have an identical pronunciation (both sounding with final [ t ]), whereas in spelling the present tense takes ‐ t and the past participle ‐d. Weak prefix verbs mutually differ in whether they are more frequent in the ‐ t form (present) or in the ‐d form (past participle). In a Cloze‐type task, subjects were asked to supply endings for these verbs, with relative frequency of the two forms being manipulated. The other factor manipulated was the extent to which the grammatical context was helpful in making it apparent which ending was required. Although the effect of both factors was established, it appeared that the impact of frequency is predominant. No interaction between factors was found. In the discussion the results are evaluated and possible links to research in the Anglo‐Saxon language area are indicated.