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In alphabetic writing systems, the most consistent correspondences hold between written and spoken segments. Although English spelling uses the Roman alphabet and is thus largely phonographic, it also encodes non-phonological distinctions such as those among homophonic words (e.g., pair, pare, pear). We review evidence that English spelling is to some extent morphographic at the level of suffixes: some suffixes (e.g. -s and -ed) have a single constant spelling (‹-s› and ‹ed›), despite the fact that they vary in phonological realization (-s is realized as [z], [s], or [əz], depending on the preceding segment); while other suffixes (e.g. ‑ic) are spelled differently from homophonous word-final phonological sequences (e.g. ‹relic› vs. ‹relick›). We explore the implications of our research for psycholinguistic findings on morphological processing of written English, with a special focus on ‘affix stripping’ processes. Psycholinguistic research has largely assumed the straightforward linguistic validity of morphographic spelling, without appreciating either its typologically unusual nature or the subtle and complex relation that it bears to morphology, phonology, and semantics.

Morphologically motivated spellings in English are usually thought to be restricted to cases like 〈electric – electrician – electricity〉, where the stem final letter 〈c〉 is kept constant in spelling although the corresponding phoneme varies in spoken language. However, there are many more – and fundamentally different – spellings that refer to morphological information. We will show this by systematically going through the three major parts of morphology: inflection, derivation, and compounding. In each area, we will identify spellings that can best be explained with reference to morphology. As a result, we will present an overview of formal and functional means of morphological spellings which goes far beyond the ubiquitous example cited above. Keywords: English; spelling; writing system; morphology; stem constancy

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