Self-organization in the spelling of English suffixes: The emergence of culture out of anarchy

Below the surface: The application of implicit morpho-graphic regularities to novel word spelling

“…Similarly, Berg and Aronoff (2017) showed the same spelling consistencies for four derivational suffixes. For example, the spelling ‹ous› for the word-final sequence /@s/ is only used in adjectives (e.g., famous, joyous), while the same final sequence is represented by other letters in other lexical categories (e.g., ‹us›, ‹is› or ‹ice› in the nouns bonus, tennis and office, respectively).…”

“…However, although the modifications to the design (compared to Ulicheva et al's (2020) set-up) made the grammatical context much more transparent and predictable, aiming at increasing the application of morpho-graphic spellings, the percentage of ‹ous› spellings was still rather low. If the implicit rule assigning adjective status to ‹ous› spellings was administered mirroring the occurrence in existing words (as revealed by Berg and Aronoff's (2017) corpus analysis), it should have been used to a higher percentage than the actual 29% in the adjective context and it should never have occurred in the noun context (where it was used 11% of the time). This pattern of ‹ous› occurrence replicates Ulicheva et al's (2020) relatively low percentage of ‹ous› use (also 29%).…”

“…As a result, the spelling system can be more informative than spoken language and might allow readers to capitalise on this additional information in language processing (e.g., by reducing ambiguities and easing lexical category assignment). Crucially, though, these regularities in the spelling of affixes -or what Aronoff et al (2016) term 'morpho-graphic spelling' -were not implemented through prescriptive pressures but, according to Berg and Aronoff (2017), developed naturally in a self-organised process and are usually not taught explicitly to readers. As a consequence, if readers are aware of these morphographic spelling regularities, they must have induced them from the input through exposure.…”

“…(4) In order to increase power, only one affix was investigated, namely -ous. This affix was selected because it is highly indicative of adjectivehood (see Berg and Aronoff 2017) and yielded the clearest differentiation between congruent (ADJ) and incongruent (N) contexts in Ulicheva et al (2020).…”

Orthography in social media: Pragmatic and prosodic interpretations of caps lock

“…The analogy between capitalization and increased pitch or volume may not be as intuitive, but even arbitrary choices may standardize over time. English spelling conventions were shown in Berg and Aranoff (2017) to have undergone self-standardization through popular usage trends, and the internet offers ample opportunity for increasingly rapid standardization. For example, Lamontagne and McCulloch (2017) have shown that even orthographic lengthening does not strictly follow phonological rules, but rather written conventions.…”