Gepo with a G, or Jepo with a J? Skilled Readers Generate Orthographic Expectations for Novel Spoken Words Even When Spelling is Uncertain

Abstract

English‐speaking children and adults generate orthographic skeletons (i.e., preliminary orthographic representations) solely from aural exposure to novel words. The present study examined whether skilled readers generate orthographic skeletons for all novel words they learn or do so only when the words have a unique possible spelling. To that end, 48 Spanish adults first provided their preferred spellings for all novel words that were to appear in the experiment. Critically, consistent words had only one, while inconsistent words had two possible spellings. Two weeks later, they were trained on the pronunciations of the novel words through aural instruction. They then saw the spellings of these newly acquired words, along with a set of untrained words, in a self‐paced sentence reading task. Participants read previously acquired consistent and inconsistent words presented in their preferred spellings faster than inconsistent words with unpreferred spellings. Importantly, no differences were observed in reading untrained consistent and inconsistent words (either preferred or unpreferred). This suggests that participants had generated orthographic skeletons for trained words with two possible spellings according to their individual spelling preferences. These findings provide further evidence for the orthographic skeleton account and show that initial orthographic representations are generated even when the spelling of a newly acquired word is uncertain.

<i>Déjà-lu</i>: When Orthographic Representations are Generated in the Absence of Orthography

“…The same 48 pictures of novel objects used in the Jevtović et al ( 2022 ) study and taken from The Novel Object and Unusual Name (NOUN) Database ( Horst & Hout, 2016 ) were selected as novel objects participants were trained on. Half of the pictures were assigned to the words from the Set A and half to the Set B (see Figure 1 ).…”

“…Due to syntactic differences across languages, the position of the target word differs between French sentences and their English translations. * French sentences were matched with Spanish sentences used in Jevtović et al ( 2022 ) study on the length as well as the place where the target word appeared.…”

“…To adjudicate between these two possibilities Jevtović et al ( 2022 ) created a similar experiment in Spanish which allowed them to control for the number of possible spellings by creating novel words with a unique (hereafter consistent words ) or two possible spellings (hereafter inconsistent words ). In their study, participants first acquired words through aural training and were then presented with their spellings in a short self-paced reading task.…”

“…The present study further investigates the orthographic skeleton hypothesis by testing whether orthographic skeletons for words with more than one legal spelling are generated even in a language with high degree of sound-to-letter inconsistency (i.e., French). To that end, we employed the same design as the one used by Jevtović et al ( 2022 ) and created three groups of novel French words. Words from the first group were created using sounds with a unique grapheme representation, or at least a highly dominant one (e.g., sounds /b/ and /d/ can only be written as <b> and <d> respectively in French; sound /i/ can be spelled <i> and <y>, however <i> represents the most common spelling).…”

“… When acquiring novel spoken words, English-speaking children generate preliminary orthographic representations even before seeing the words’ spellings ( Wegener et al, 2018 ). Interestingly, these orthographic skeletons are generated even when novel words’ spellings are uncertain, at least in transparent languages like Spanish ( Jevtović et al, 2022 ). Here we investigate whether this process depends on the orthographic rules of the language, and specifically, whether orthographic skeletons for words with uncertain spellings are generated even when the probability of generating an incorrect representation is high.…”