BRAIN AND LANGUAGE 19, 153-178 (1983) Writing Nonwords to Dictation RUTH CAMPBELL Two experiments show that the spelling of a nonword that is heard (i.e., ipreinl) is influenced by the spelling of a word that is heard earlier (i.e., “brain” > prain and “crane” > prane). This is a robust effect and inspection of the pattern of results suggests that, under these conditions, both words and nonwords are lexically analyzed. A patient with an aquired reading disorder characterized as surface dyslexia was unaffected by such lexical influences in his spelling of nonwords. Moreover. his spelling suggested a defective ability to generate pho- nemically acceptable spellings of nonwords. Taken together with other reports of neurologically caused spelling impairments these results suggest that skill at assigning letters to sounds never becomes independent of lexical skill in adult readers. An analogical, lexically based parsing system for the reading and spelling of new (nonwords. as suggested by Marcel (1980) appears to be the best fit to these data. INTRODUCTION The purpose of the experiments reported here is to cast some light on the processes involved in adult English spelling. The specific question asked is “can lexical events influence the spelling of nonwords?” This may seem an odd, even irrelevant question, since the point of spelling is to be able to spell known words, yet the rationale underlying the question arises from one of the most potent current theories about how people spell. This theory has both explicit and implicit exponents. Here is one explicit version: the theory is that there are two routes of spelling, namely a phonemic-graphic route which operates by translating the phonemic elements of the word as spoken into their graphemic equivalents and a direct semantic route. (Nelson. 1980) 1 thank Karalyn Patterson for permission to use data from her patient and for her valuable critical comments on the manuscript. I also thank Max Coltheart, Sally Byng. and Jackie Masterson for permission to examine E.E. and for data concerning his reading. I also thank them for their critical comments on the manuscript. John Long’s interest in this work and several important discussions with him concerning it are acknowledged with pleasure and gratitude. Send requests for reprints to Dr. Ruth Campbell, Department of Psychology. University College London. Malet St.. London WCIE 6BT. England. I53 0093-934X183 $3.00 All Copyright 0 1983 by Academic Press, Inc. rights of reproduction in any form reserved.
Transcript
BRAIN AND LANGUAGE 19, 153-178 (1983)
Writing Nonwords to Dictation
RUTH CAMPBELL
Two experiments show that the spelling of a nonword that is heard (i.e., ipreinl) is influenced by the spelling of a word that is heard earlier (i.e., “brain” > prain and “crane” > prane). This is a robust effect and inspection of the pattern of results suggests that, under these conditions, both words and nonwords are lexically analyzed. A patient with an aquired reading disorder characterized as surface dyslexia was unaffected by such lexical influences in his spelling of nonwords. Moreover. his spelling suggested a defective ability to generate pho- nemically acceptable spellings of nonwords. Taken together with other reports of neurologically caused spelling impairments these results suggest that skill at assigning letters to sounds never becomes independent of lexical skill in adult readers. An analogical, lexically based parsing system for the reading and spelling of new (nonwords. as suggested by Marcel (1980) appears to be the best fit to these data.
INTRODUCTION
The purpose of the experiments reported here is to cast some light on the processes involved in adult English spelling. The specific question asked is “can lexical events influence the spelling of nonwords?” This may seem an odd, even irrelevant question, since the point of spelling is to be able to spell known words, yet the rationale underlying the question arises from one of the most potent current theories about how people spell. This theory has both explicit and implicit exponents. Here is one explicit version:
the theory is that there are two routes of spelling, namely a phonemic-graphic route which operates by translating the phonemic elements of the word as spoken into their graphemic equivalents and a direct semantic route. (Nelson. 1980)
1 thank Karalyn Patterson for permission to use data from her patient and for her valuable critical comments on the manuscript. I also thank Max Coltheart, Sally Byng. and Jackie Masterson for permission to examine E.E. and for data concerning his reading. I also thank them for their critical comments on the manuscript. John Long’s interest in this work and several important discussions with him concerning it are acknowledged with pleasure and gratitude. Send requests for reprints to Dr. Ruth Campbell, Department of Psychology. University College London. Malet St.. London WCIE 6BT. England.
I53 0093-934X183 $3.00
All Copyright 0 1983 by Academic Press, Inc.
rights of reproduction in any form reserved.
154 RUTHCAMPBELL
In other words, two processes are claimed to operate in writing to dictation-which shall be called spelling in the present paper. One process is said to be direct and lexical (or lexico-semantic); the other is said to be alexical and operates as an autonomous system for ascribing letters to speech sounds. The most sensible sort of alexical system appears to be a phoneme-grapheme correspondence system (see Coltheart (1978) for persuasive arguments against other types of segmentation systems in reading). There are many other explicit protagonists of the view that spelling comprises a lexical (direct) and an alexical (indirect) system. These include (inter alia) Seymour and Porpodas (1980), Frith (1980), Morton (1980), Morton and Patterson (1980), Barron (1980), Beauvois and Derouesne (1979, 1981), and Ellis (1982). There is not room to list more, but there is no doubt that the dual-process account of spelling constitutes the current orthodoxy.
Three points can be made, however, which suggest that faith in the dual-process account may be somewhat misplaced.
Developmental studies of the way that knowledge of written words affects spelling skill suggest that at the start of their literate life young readers spell words that they know, but have not yet read, by analogy with words whose spelling is familiar to them (see for example Marsh, Friedman, Welch, & Desberg, 1980.) It is assumed that, as lexical knowl- edge increases, so reliance on lexical analogies in spelling decreases and the child develops the ability to use a set of autonomous alexical phoneme- grapheme rules. Yet it must be stressed that a student’s ability to spell new words so that they sound correct is not conclusive evidence that a developed phoneme-grapheme rule system is operating. Increased lexicul knowledge and flexibility in lexical decomposition will have precisely the same effect, for the simple reason that the more words one knows how to spell, the more likely one is to generate a graphemic rendering of a set of unfamiliar sounds that will be understood by another reader. Fur- thermore, if developing spelling ability depended on a dissociation between lexical and alexical systems for spelling, we would expect to see greater uniformity in a child’s spelling as he gets the hang of the rules.
A second point is that there are far more ways of spelling a word so that it sounds correct than there are of reading it so that it is correctly pronounced. Thus a phoneme-grapheme system is a highly unreliable means of generating word spellings that are acceptable to a reader. This is hardly a new point; it is demonstrated by Henderson and Chard (1980) and investigated in some detail by Baker (1980). Since we are intelligent and adaptable in other ways, is it not likely that in this way too, we are aware of the pitfalls and avoid them? One simple way to do this would be for spelling never to become entirely independent of word knowledge- even in the adult reader.
The third point is that in reading the dual-process hypothesis has been
WRITING NONWORDS TO DICTATION 155
found wanting. The dual-process account of reading is the mirror image of that outlined above for spelling. That is, it assumes two routes to pronunciation from the written word. One, the direct route, is thought to be used to access the lexical entry for the word which directs one to, or contains the pronunciation pattern of, that word. The other is assumed to use an alexical, independent grapheme-phoneme system which will, on the basis of simple letter-sound ascription rules and on the basis of some context sensitive prescriptions (such as “c” is always soft before “i” and “e”) enable the reader to pronounce an unfamiliar word or letter string.
Since reading does not present the problem of deciding which is the correct way to write a word and of choosing the correct letter from many to describe the sound that is heard, on the face of it, reading looks a more attractive proposal for dual-process theory. On the whole, too, the theory has served reading well. Yet there is evidence that. even in reading, the strict distinction between lexical and alexical processes fails to do justice to events. This evidence has been marshalled by Marcel (1980) and by Kay and Marcel (198 I ). They argue that lexical and alexical processes in reading cannot be as clearly distinguished as dual-process theory, in its traditional form, predicts.
The starting point for this demonstration is the series of investigations into reading problems following cerebral insult (squired dyslexias). At first sight, such problems appear to support the dual-process model of reading. A group of patients (group A) has been identified that can read all manner of words, including those that are spelled in an irregular way and cannot therefore be read by the use of grapheme-phoneme rules. but cannot read nonwords (for instance prain). A group of patients (group B) has been identified that reads irregularly spelled words poorly, and that has trouble in identifying homophone pair members (pear/pair), yet which can read nonwords like praitz reasonably well. According to dual- process theory, group A patients are reading by use of the intact direct lexical route, but they have lost the ability to use the alexical grapheme- phoneme route and hence cannot read nonwords. Group B patients by contrast can only read alexically. That is, they have no means of using the direct route, or, alternatively. their orthographic lexicon is impaired and so they are driven to alexical reading.
It would appear to be axiomatic that these two reading patterns dissociate, that is. that none of the symptoms of group A patients appear in group B patients, in order for the dual-process story to be upheld. But this is not the case. Far from pronouncing all regular words so that they sound correct, patients from group B (whom we shall now call, following common usage, surface dyslexics) often make errors in pronunciation. These might appear to reflect inadequate grapheme-phoneme rule use. Thus BEAT was read as /bet/ by one patient (Holmes,l973) and CHECK as /tJi:k/
156 RUTH CAMPBELL
by another (Coltheart,l981). Another often cited example is RECENT read as lrikantl (or something like that; see Newcombe & Marshall, 1973).
Do surface dyslexics then suffer from two impairments, one in the ability to recognize words on sight and one in the ability to apply alexical rules of pronunciation? If this were the case, then, as Marcel (1980). Kay & Marcel (1981), Patterson and Hatfield (1980), and Henderson (1982) all point out, a group of patients should have been identified who, while showing the other characteristics of surface dyslexia, that is, difficulty in reading irregular words and in disambiguating homophones, should not be impaired in grapheme-phoneme rule use. Such patients should read regularly spelled words and nonwords correctly. This demonstration has not been forthcoming. Therefore, Marcel (1980) proceeds from the assumption that, far from suffering two impairments, surface dyslexic patients sometimes fail to read regularly spelled words and nonwords correctly for the same reason that they fail to read irregular words. That is, their reading disabilities reflect a single impairment.
How would this operate? Marcel suggests that the pronunciation of words and of nonwords always proceeds according to lexically driven principles. There may well be (indeed there appears to be no reason to doubt that there are) two processes in reading, but both are lexical. One is direct and proceeds by immediate lexical specification of the word. This may be used for regularly and irregularly spelled words. The other process, however, is not an autonomous letter-sound rule system, but involves left to right parsing of the letter string which is exhaustive and which is subject to lexical constraints. Lexical specifications of larger segments can override smaller segments. Thus, in the indirect reading of READ, the initial analysis RE > /ri/ would be overwritten as REA and READ are parsed, for READ, as a known word, has a known pronunciation, while RE-AD has not. Such lexically based parsing pro- cedures can lead to the range of effects that are predicted by grapheme- phoneme rules, including context sensitivity. Indeed in Juent readers the outcome of such a strategy would be indistinguishable from that predicted by skilled use of grapheme-phoneme rules.
Thus, according to this account, the deficit in surface dyslexia arises from the destruction, in large part, of the orthographic lexicon. The patient is then left with an inability to read many words on sight and also an inability to read some regularly spelled words and nonwords correctly, for he will have lost the lexical entries which would drive the indirect reading system.
Kay and Marcel (1981) proceed to test certain assumptions of the lexical parsing model of reading. They argue that if lexical processes play a part in reading nonwords then words that are read prior to reading the nonwords should affect the pronunciation of those (target) nonwords. On dual-process accounts the pronunciation of written nonwords is not
WRITING NONWORDS TO DICTATION 157
subject to any lexical influences, so there should be no effect of any prior lexical events on the pronunciation of nonwords. It is necessary that the potential “primes” are words that cannot be read aloud by the putative alexical route for otherwise nothing will have been demonstrated. Kay and Marcel showed that reading a word that is irregularly spelled, like HEAD, can lead to a significant increase in led/ pronunciations for nonwords like YEAD, when HEAD is read before YEAD. They also showed that a good predictor of pronunciation was the pronunciation of component subwords or morphemes that could be generated from the nonword by left to right parsing.
Thus, on two counts, it would appear that nonword reading (and there- fore, by implication, words that are not read by direct lexical access, such as words that might be known when heard and spoken but not as written words) is essentially lexical in nature and not alexical as the grapheme-phoneme rule plan asserts.
To recapitulate: Marcel, on the basis of evidence from surface dyslexic reading, asserts that, although there may be two separable processes involved in reading, these are not lexically independent. Not only the direct route, which is used for “recognizing” a word and accessing its component sounds directly from the lexical entry, but also the indirect route may be essentially lexical. The indirect route in pronouncing letter strings takes a different form in Marcel’s analysis than in the accepted version. Marcel asserts that pronouncing print indirectly relies little, if at all, on autonomous grapheme-phoneme rules. Instead, the letter string is parsed from left to right and lexical knowledge of the component subparts determines pronunciation. Where as in surface dyslexics (and, of course, in beginning readers) the orthographic lexicon is impaired or impoverished deficits will be seen in the ability to read words and nonwords aloud.
It is the contention of this paper that Marcel’s conception of the way in which print is pronounced can profitably be extended to the converse process, that is writing words and nonwords to dictation-spelling. It has been pointed out that in spelling, unlike reading, constraints on performance are very likely to be lexical. One cannot hope to write prose for another to read, however correct one’s phoneme-grapheme rules, unless one uses lexical knowledge. (This, at least, is the case in the last hundred or so years, since spelling has become uniform.) Is it the case, then, that in spelling, as in reading aloud, even nonwords show lexical influences? On the basis of the objections outlined above that is exactly what would be predicted for normal spellers.
So, by inverting Kay and Marcel’s experiment and examining the effects of word pronunciation on nonword spelling, would lexical priming occur? If this were the case then Marcel’s analysis could be usefully extended to spelling as well as to pronouncing print. Such lexical priming
158 RUTH CAMPBELL
of nonword spellings is not predicted by traditional dual-process spelling theory. So, if lexical priming of nonwords fails to occur this would constitute powerful evidence that the traditional theory is correct-for spelling at any rate.
The three experiments reported here all examine performance on the same task. The task is an auditory lexical decision task. That is, subjects are asked to decide if a speech sound that they hear is or is not a word. Where they hear a nonword, and only then, they are to write it down. The dependent variable is the extent to which the written spelling of a word heard prior to the target nonword affects that nonword’s spelling. It should be noted that at no stage is the subject required to write down a word. If he were to write down all the items that he heard it is possible that he might simply copy a spelling pattern from a word onto a nonword. However, if a heard word affects nonword spelling this would strongly suggest that, on hearing words being spoken there is multiple activation of the codes associated with those words, including the way that those words are written. The suggestion that the spelling of a heard word may affect other aspects of processing has been made by Jakimik, Cole, and Rudniky (1980). They showed that priming in an auditory lexical decision task could reflect the spelling of the words that were heard. Thus hearing “wreck” would speed responses to “wreckage” but not to “record.” If a heard word’s spelling affects the spelling of a following nonword it would seem that, in auditory lexical decisions, processing is not limited to auditory lexical entry and search.
Method
EXPERIMENT 1
In this experiment 20 UCL undergraduate psychology students volunteered for a 5-min experiment. Their normal spelling was not formally tested since there are no readily available spelling norms for students of this age and intellectual caliber. Several were. by their own admission, poor spellers.
The students were seen individually or in pairs. They were instructed that they would hear a list of words and nonwords mixed up and that they were to write down the nonwords as accurately as they could. These lists were prerecorded and played on a cassette recorder at a rate of one item every 2 sec. There were two lists, each containing 170 monosyllabic words and nonwords, usually of the form (C)CVC(C). Each list contained 22 target nonwords which were identical across lists and which occurred in the same position in each list. Immediately preceding each of these target nonwords was a word which rhymed with the target nonword but the spelling of each such prime differed in each list. Thus the nonword /gi:l/ might be preceded by “kneel” in one list and “deal” in the other. Subjects were randomly assigned to one or other list.
No attempt was made to control frequency of the prime words, nor their constituent spelling patterns. Thus some primes contained spellings that were “inconsistent” by Glushko’s (1979) criterion. No primes, however, were of words whose spelling patterns were unique (such as YACHT, SEW). In most cases, the target phoneme in the target nonword was the medial vowel sound. This was because it appears (see Wijk. 1966: Seymour and
WRITING NONWORDS TO DICTATION 159
Porpodas, 1980) that vowels present the greatest variety of possible spelling patterns in English. Thus the potential for priming the spelling of the vowel seemed to be greater for these than for other sounds. However, in some nonwords, such as /spi:z/ and igensi, the critical spelling was for the final consonant(s). “cheese/sneeze” and “sense/pence” were the respective primes. Dummy words and nonwords sometimes constituted rhyme pairs similar to target and prime pairs: this was to minimize the possibility that subjects might rely on a strategy of selectively searching rhyme pairs for spelling clues.
Only the target phonemes were scored. Thus, KIRE, CHIRE, and even CIRE were accepted as primed spellings for lkaiai preceded by WIRE. All other spellings, including those of the alternate prime (e.g., KYRE) form are included under the heading “other spellings.”
The results lend strong support to the lexical parsing model. Every subject, without exception, gave more primed spellings than any other type of spelling. Overall, 65% of the responses were spelled like the primes: 26% were spelled in another fashion, while 9% were missed. (That is, the prime was erroneously written down as a nonword or the target nonword was not written down because it was thought to be a word. Of these “miss” errors approximately three-quarters were of this latter type.)
In Table 1 the proportion of these three classes of spelling is shown for each target nonword.
Post Hoc Analyses
Word components of nonMwds and their primes. It is axiomatic to Marcel’s system that words and nonwords be lexically parsed. Should such parsing occur in spelling, the extent of priming should be predicted by the number of constituent words that are embedded, in left to right form, in the nonword and in the prime. So, for example, lboupi contains two words, BOW and OWE. These spellings are not present in either of the primes ROPE and SOAP. So it is likely that iboupi will show reduced priming in comparison with, say, /fri:t/, whose component sub- words FREE and EAT have their spelling patterns represented in the primes TREAT and STREET.
A value of 0 was given to nonwords whose constituent words were nil (/gens/) or whose constituent nonwords appeared in neither prime (iboupi). A value of I was given to those items where one subword spelling was present in one of the primes. Thus /slu:ml contains LOOM and SLEW. Only the LOOM spelling was represented in one prime: the other spelling was not. A value of 2 was given to items where there were at least two spelling patterns present in the component words and where two of these patterns were also represented in the primes (e.g., /fri:t/ contains FREE and EAT, both of which are primed spellings).
TABL
E 1
s SP
ELLI
NG
FR
EQU
ENC
IES
OF
NO
NW
OR
DS
IN
EXPE
RIM
ENT
1
Non
wor
d Pr
ime
A Pr
ime
B pr
imed
O
ther
--
~ prej
n br
ain
cran
e 10
4
boup
so
ap
rope
11
8
frJ:l
craw
l st
all
10
7 m
ourn
fo
am
dom
e 13
3
1J:k
po
rk
haw
k 17
3
kaia
w
ire
liar(l
yre)
13
7
tJ%
l fr5
sp
oil
roya
l 15
5
chea
t gr
eet
16
3 ne
a ca
re
chai
r II
3 kG
t fri
ght
whi
te
15
5 Zo
lJ
coal
po
le(p
ol1)
15
5
PIE2
cl
ose
toes
(tow
s)
8 5
priJ
sw
eet
treat
12
8
fraua
l tro
wel
gr
owl
14
3 ka
z ch
urch
bi
rch
12
8 zz
he
at
shee
t 12
8
zeil
stal
e sn
ail
17
2 g&
s pe
nce
sens
e 14
5
slEm
pl
ume
gloo
m
12
8 tJ
a:st
fir
st
burs
t 13
6
slei
m
clai
m
blam
e 12
4
spTz
ch
eese
sn
eeze
16
4
Mea
n 13
.06
5.18
“ Pe
rcen
tage
prim
ing
is g
iven
by
the
sum
of
the
prim
ed s
pellin
gs (
A a
nd B
)/prim
ed
and
alte
rnat
e sp
ellin
gs.
Mis
sed
6 I 3 4 0 0 0 I 6 0 0 7 0 3 0 0 1 1 0 1 4 4 1.76
Perc
enta
ge
prim
ing”
71
58
59
81
85
65
75
84
79
75
75
62
60
82 6 60
89
74
60
68
75
80
71.6
8 ._
__
WRITING NONWORDS TO DICTATION 161
The correlation between these component word scores and the extent of priming was significant at Y = 0.43, n = 22, p < .05.
The number of constituent words that could be generated by left to right parsing of the nonword did not in itself generate a significant correlation with priming (Y < 0.03).
Thus it appears that not only does the spelling of a word heard prior to spelling a nonword affect nonword spelling, but also that, where a nonword can be parsed into word components, priming will be related to the extent to which such component spellings are present in the prime.
Oddities. Table I just shows spellings for the target phonemes. A range of other phonemes indicate that lexical influences-or at least highly idiosyncratic phoneme-grapheme rules-were at work in this experiment. These seemed to occur over all subjects and are not confined to just one or two. Thus, among the spellings for ikaiai are CAIRE and the phon- ologically incorrect CIER (twice) and CIRE (twice). For lka:tJ/ QUIRCH was given and for ipreini, PRAYN and PRAYNE.
Since CIRE and CIER are not phonologically acceptable (and QUIRCH is dubious) it would appear that subjects used specific lexical strategies to generate these spellings. Perhaps they tried to delete R from CRIER to give CIER.
Comparing the effects of spellings of nonwords thut occurred early in the list with those that occurred later. Although the primary dependent variable in this experiment was the spelling of the rhymed sound of each target word, this experiment allows an examination of the influence of both prime and of earlier spelling on vowel sounds alone.
For instance, /ou/ occurred first in iboupi then in /mourn/ and finally in lzouli. In this case the same spelling pattern was primed on each occasion; for list A an OA spelling always preceded the target nonword while in list B the spelling was always OE. Is there then a cumulative effect of priming and of simple exposure to and use of this spelling pattern? 63% of lboupi spellings were primed; 81% of /mourn/ and 70% of /zoul/. This is not strong evidence that prevous spelling pattern and lexical effects are additive. However, of the seven spellings of lboupi that were not the same as the prime, 4 (57%) showed the same spelling pattern as for /zoul/ and for /mourn/. This suggests, albeit tentatively, that there can be consistency in subjects’ spelling that may be independent of lexical pressures.
How do subjects fare when there is conflicting, rather than congruent spelling pressure from the primes? Several examples of these occur in the lists. The /i:/ series (/fri:t/, /pri:tl, /zi:t/) will be considered first. First consider the pair /fri:t/ followed by lpri:t/. In List A, /fri:t/ was primed by EAT spelling, in List B by EET. Then the pattern was reversed for /pri:t/. Sixteen of nineteen subjects (84%) gave the primed spelling for /fri:t/; only 12/20 (60%) for lpri:t/. This would suggest, all other things
162 RUTH CAMPBELL
being equal (which they probably were not in this experiment), that a spelling pattern can be set up on the first occurrence of a phoneme set which may be somewhat resistant to pressure to change from a lexical prime. It is very clear, however, that this first spelling is lexically set and that it is still more likely that a subject will bend to the lexical wind than to stick to his prior spelling pattern.
Examination of the continued series of Ii:/ nonwords is interesting. The series continues with alternate prime spellings. How do subjects respond to such lexical buffeting? If a spelling pattern is established is it used consistently? At least 7 subjects out of the 18 who spelled every one of these nonwords showed consistent spelling-either EA or EE throughout all /i:/ exemplars. Only one subject showed consistent lexical priming throughout. The other subjects showed a mixed pattern of response. The examination of other series containing the same medial vowel sound suggests that lexical priming effects are far more marked than spelling consistency through the list. It is likely that in the ii:/ series consistency is helped by much of the series being of the same two phonemes-/i:t/, rather than of single phonemes (like the /ei/ in /prein/, /zeil/ and /sleim/.)
Conclusion
There is little doubt that hearing words affects the spelling of nonwords. So lexical and alexical processes cannot be neatly separated when one has to write nonwords to dictation and one hears words during the task. This nonindependence has (at least) two aspects. First, a word heard prior to the nonword that is to be spelled influences the spelling of that nonword. This happens although the word itself is neither written down, nor is it explicitIy processed for its constituent letters. Thus, in confirmation of Jakimik et al. (1980), it seems that hearing a word for auditory lexical decision does not just involve auditory lexical search. The spelling of the word-whether directly or through its morphemic or even semantic components-is also activated by this task. Second, the word components of nonwords and their primes determine the extent of priming that is observed. That is, both words and nonwords appear to be lexically parsed in this experiment. Neither of these effects is predicted by phoneme- grapheme rule application in spelling nonwords.
That said, there is some evidence, from the way that nonwords are spelled when their primed phonemes recur through the list, that subjects can be consistent in their use of a spelling system. There is no doubt, though, that such consistency would appear to be largely determined by the spelling of a word that they hear before the first occurrence of the nonword containing the repeated phoneme(s) and in most cases is sus- ceptible to lexical pressures from the prior word.
WRITING NONWORDS TO DICTATION 163
EXPERIMENT 2
Introduction
Experiment 1 showed that a word that is heard before a nonword is spelled affects the spelling of that nonword. In this experiment the effect of interpolating a word or nonword between the prime (word) and target (nonword) is investigated.
This has two purposes. The more important is that varying the lexical status of a filler item will provide converging evidence to bear on the question of whether nonwords as well as words are lexically processed in this task. If only words are lexically processed one could predict that a word filler should “dilute” the priming effect more than a similar nonword. That is, an irrelevant word occurring between prime and target might be expected to set up its own, specific, associations that would interfere with the relationship between prime and target. By contrast, a nonword unrelated to the target nonword orthographically or phonemically should not be expected to have such an effect. If, however, words and nonwords have similar effects it might appear, as was suspected from the analyses of the effects of component words in nonwords and primes in Experiment 1, that nonwords and words are lexically parsed in this experiment. The secondary purpose is that, by varying the absolute time between prime and target, we may be able to track the time course of such priming. In this experiment about 5 set elapse between target and prime; in the previous one only 2 set separated their onsets.
Method Four lists of words and nonwords that closely resembled those used in Experiment I
were assembled. In this experiment, however. the lists were longer, comprising 220 items in each list, in all. Position of prime and target was the same in each list. What varied was the spelling of the prime (and therefore the prime itself) and the nature of the filler item. These were systematically varied across the lists. Thus where list A had the sequence “leaf, hope, /zi:f/“, List B had “beef, hope, izi:f/“. List C then had “leaf. hobe. /zi:f/” and List D had “beef. hobe. /zi:f/“. Apart from these systematic variations in prime and filler the lists were identical in all respects. There were 26 target nonwords. These are shown with their primes in Table 2.
The subjects were from the same pool as Experiment I. None had served in that experiment. There were seven subjects in each of the four list groups. They were assigned randomly to these lists. Instructions were exactly as detailed in Experiment I.
It should be noted that, in this experiment. there were rather more target vowel and (final) consonant prime pairs than in Experiment I. There were also some primed consonant endings. The primed phonemes are underlined in the phonetic description of the nonwords in Table 2.
The results are shown in Table 2 where the number of spellings of each nonword is shown as a function of the filler type. One difference from Table I is that a distinction is made in Table 2 between the two
TABL
E 2
SPEL
LIN
G
FREQ
UEN
CIE
S O
F N
ON
WO
RD
S IN
EX
PER
IMEN
T 2
E
Non
wor
d Pr
ime
A Pr
ime
B Fi
ller-t
ype
wor
d/no
n Pr
imed
sp
ellin
g Al
tern
ate
spel
ling
Oth
er
spel
ling
Mis
s
Perc
enta
ge
prim
e sp
ellin
g”
ZijJ
v5:z
- zi:f - t@
iI
nip
dsG
wi:s
-
j=
zi:z
- sk
oks
23: - di
.k
2 snu:
-
rich
caus
e
leaf
nail
ripe
kept
niec
e
bone
teas
(e)
stoc
ks
roar
chee
k be
ak
glue
ch
ew
stitc
h
jaw
s
beef
dale
type
step
ped
fleec
e
moa
n (m
own)
w
heez
e
box
chor
e
wor
d 7
nonw
ord
11
wor
d 3
nonw
ord
5 w
ord
6 no
nwor
d 5
wor
d IO
no
nwor
d 9
wor
d 7
nonw
ord
8 w
ord
10
nonw
ord
9 w
ord
5 no
nwor
d 0
wor
d 6
nonw
ord
II w
ord
3 no
nwor
d 3
wor
d II
nonw
ord
6 w
ord
5 no
nwor
d 4
wor
d 5
nonw
ord
7 w
ord
4 no
nwor
d 2
7 3 2 0 3 I I 2 7 3 2 5 1 I 5 3 I 1 I 4 4 5 4 3 I I
0 0
0 0
7 2
8 I
5 0
6 2
I 2
0 3
0 0
2 I
2 0
0 0
7 I
12
I 2
1 0
0 9
1 10
0
2 0
1 3
5 0
3 2
5 0
4 0
9 0
IO
I
64
80
73
5 86
2
60
P
SC
73
2
71
68
75
77
50
63
75
za:
I - PC
?.@
sti: -
tJei
d -
zeri - zeid
- gaks
jzl slei
m
-
ja& trsk
girl
dow
n
tea
raid
very
glad
e
rack
s
hole
flam
e
wise
brok
e
curl
noun
knee
jade
mer
ry
paid
tax
coal
clai
m
size
cloa
k
wor
d I 0
I
3 0
nonw
ord
8 I
5 0
wor
d IO
I
I 2
nonw
ord
6 5
I 2
wor
d 7
4 I
2 no
nwor
d 8
6 0
0 w
ord
IO
4 0
0 no
nwor
d 6
6 0
0 w
ord
8 2
4 0
nonw
ord
8 3
3 0
wor
d 8
6 0
0 no
nwor
d 9
5 0
0 w
ord
IO
4 0
0 no
nwor
d 8
3 3
0 w
ord
7 3
4 0
nonw
ord
6 6
2 0
wor
d 7
3 0
4 no
nwor
d 9
4 0
I w
ord
8 0
6 0
nonw
ord
II I
2 0
wor
d 8
4 1
I
90
73
60
62
76
61
72
59
70
95
nonw
ord
8 5
I 0
64
zi:a
d be
ard
fear
ed
wor
d 3
0 -
II 0
nonw
ord
7 2
4 I
83
moi
z - to
ys
nois
e w
ord
8 3
3 0
nonw
ord
8 2
3 I
76
” Pe
rcen
tage
pr
imin
g (fi
nal
colu
mn)
is
gi
ven
by
the
sum
of
th
e (w
ord
and
nonw
ord)
pr
imed
sp
ellin
g/pr
imed
an
d al
tern
ate
prim
e sp
ellin
g.
166 RUTHCAMPBELL
spellings offered by the primes and all other spellings. It can be seen that the primed spelling is generated significantly more often than the alternate primed spelling, thus providing strong confirmation that lexical priming is occurring, even with a filler between prime and target. Yet it is also clear that, unlike Experiment I, priming is not significantly greater than for all other spellings. Before concluding that this must indicate a dilution of priming, it should be pointed out that primes and targets were not identical in the two experiments and indeed, where prime and target are similar in the two experiments, priming appears to be roughly equivalent in the two experiments. (The reader may compare Tables 1 and 2 and draw his own conclusions.)
The type of filler makes no difference to the extent of priming. The t test on the effect of filler type fails to generate a significant difference. Thus it appears that words and nonwords are receiving similar treatment in this experiment.
Component MJOY~ effects. In Experiment I primed spellings of nonwords were found to reflect the number of spelling patterns common to component words embedded in the nonword and the primes. In the present experiment the same analysis is made. That is, a score (0, I, 2) corresponding to the presence of a component word in none, one, or both primes was given to each nonword spelling. This correlated with the extent of priming significantly (Y = 0.42 (n = 26, p < .05)).
There are further, qualitative indications that component words are parsed from nonwords in this experiment. These can be seen by examining the spellings in the “other” category (i.e., not according to either prime). At first sight, the presence of such large numbers of spellings in this category might suggest that there was little lexical parsing of nonwords. But this would be erroneous. On the whole, the items that generate a large number of “other” spellings are in the category of nonwords that show values of 0 for component words. But a 0 score can be achieved in two ways. It can reflect no words in the item (e.g., lzi:f/) or it can mean that one (or more) word(s) is present in the nonword but not in the (either) prime. Thus /za: I/ contains EARL, but the primes are “curl” and “girl.”
If there is lexical decomposition of nonwords, further evidence of this may be sought in nonwords of this class, that is in the class of “other” spellings. In Table 3 are shown the spellings of nonwords in this class, for nonwords that contained “unprimed words” and for nonwords that contain no words at all. It is clear, from inspection, that there is a strong likelihood of a spelling pattern that can be predicted from the word component of a nonword appearing consistently in the spelling of the nonword. In fact, examination of these forms suggests that /di:k/ may have been wrongly categorized as containing no word components.
WRITING NONWORDS TO DICTATION 167
TABLE 3 “OTHER” SPELLINGS OF TARGET NONWORDS WITH A COMPONENT WORD SCORE OF 0
a) Nonwords with word components absent from either prime vo:z (contains OR,ORE) > vorse (6); vors (3); vorze: vorz: vauls; voors zz (contains OR,ORE) > zor (5); zorl; zorr; zoor za:l (contains EARL) > zearl (4); zerl (2): zerle: zowl joJ (contains OWE) > yowl (3); yol: youl; yaul jaiz (contains EYE(s)) .- > yeyes (3): yies (2): yeise: yeize: yyze
(b) Nonwords with no component words in them zi:f > zeif (2): zief (2); ziff (3); zife; zif (2); zef wi:s > Weiss (4): wease (3): weese (2); weece; wice (2); weasr; wis; weis; wise; wece:
The archaic word EKE (“to eke a living” and “eke he was a child”) appears to be exerting an effect. Compare for instance, the variable spellings of/i:/ in /zi:f/ where no EFE spelling was generated, with those of /di:k/.
Oddities. Table 3 provides additional examples of spelling patterns that are idiosyncratic. It is particularly interesting that nonwords like /wi:s/ and /di:k/ can generate word spellings (WISE, DYKE, DIKE). Another example of this, not shown in Table 3, was iyouni > YAWN. It appears that the parsing pressures are so great on subjects that they fail to realize that they have written words for nonwords.
Not all spellings were phonologically correct. The reader may like to try out the various spellings of /zi:f/ and /wi:s/ on naive readers. Some of these errors may arise from careless writing or from mishearings: but this is unlikely to explain all the errors. And why should so many such errors be concentrated on so few items? These items, moreover, are those which would not seem to offer any great problems in terms of phoneme to grapheme rule application, but they do tend to be the items that contain no word components.
Some spellings are phonologically correct, in that English words do occur that contain such spellings, but these are rare or even unique. Thus SNOE which was written for /snu:/ is correct, since the pronunciation occurs in SHOE, but it is not phonologically predictable as a spelling for /snu:/. VOORS and ZOOR occured as spellings of /va:z/ and /za:/ respectively. Presumably these are pronounced by analogy with FLOOR, DOOR. etc.
168 RUTHCAMPBELL
Conclusion
Lexical priming from a word that is heard 5 set before a nonword is written and lexical parsing effects have been demonstrated in this ex- periment on the spelling of nonwords. While spelling for many of the items was markedly more variable than in Experiment I, nevertheless the evidence that these spellings provide for lexical analysis of the nonwords that are spelled is considerable. Spelling variability is most marked for those items that contained no word components. Where words are com- ponents of the tested nonwords their spellings tend to be generated. When these word spelling patterns are also present in the prime words priming predicts nonword spelling.
There was no evidence that words and nonword fillers had distinguishable effects on priming when the prime occured two items before the target. It is clear, however, that the effect of priming is still highly significant, for more primed than alternate prime spellings were generated for every stimulus and for every subject.
This experiment confirms the findings of Experiment 1. These findings suggest that words and nonwords that are heard are lexically analyzed prior to spelling, and that when a word is heard which rhymes with a following nonword there is a strong likelihood that the nonword will be spelled like the word. This is true whether the word prime occurs one or two items before the nonword and the effect is insensitive to the lexical status of a filler between prime and target.
EXPERIMENT 3
Introduction
Experiments 1 and 2 showed robust lexical effects on nonword spelling. We would now like to know whether and how such effects are related to problems in reading and writing that follow neurological insult. In order to do this the distinction between the traditional dual-process and lexical parsing theory will need to be amplified. This will be done by reference to one type of reading disorder that is traditionally assumed to reflect a sparing of grapheme-phoneme processes in reading and pre- dictions from dual-process and lexical parsing theory on how such patients with this disorder might perform Experiment 1. The case study of R.G. (Beauvois and DCrouesnC, 1979, 1981) who could read regular and irregular words but not nonwords, yet whose writing of words to dictation was not always lexically correct, though it was phonologically correct, will also be discussed.
Surface dyslexia is a condition which manifests the following reading problems: first, patients cannot read irregularly spelled words reliably. Second, they cannot correctly discriminate homophonic spellings of words. Thus when asked to point to the written word that spelled “beer: an
WRITING NONWORDS TO DICTATION 169
alcoholic drink,” a patient might point to BIER, when both BEER and BIER are presented. Third, they often confuse irregularly spelled words with the regular pronunciation of such words, so a patient, on being given the definition, “beer: an alcoholic drink” is also very likely to point to BEAR as the correct written description of what he has heard. Often patients make nonword for word errors (neologisms) in attempting to read words aloud. These patients appear to show no particular handicap in reading nonwords. Finally, these patients’ reading of regularly spelled words and of nonwords is not always perfect (see p. 155 above).
All these symptoms, except the last one, are predicted by traditional dual-process theory. According to this theory, surface dyslexics either have an impairment in the ability to find the correct lexical address or the lexicon itself may be impaired. In addition, to account for the last symptom, that of apparently impaired grapheme-phoneme rule use. a deficit, though not a very marked one, must be posited for the alexical route.
According to dual-process theory how would we expect such patients to spell nonwords to dictation? This depends on knowing two things: the first is are there two orthographic lexicons, one for reading and one for spelling? One published case history may lead one to believe that this is the case: but, as will be shown below, this particular case, that of R.G., bears another interpretation. Allport and Funnel1 (1981) make cogent arguments, including parsimony, that one lexicon is used for reading and for spelling. This assumption will be maintained by this author, too. The second is, are phonemes translated into graphemes by the same single system whereby graphemes are translated into phonemes‘? This seems not to be the case. Not only is there asymmetrical mapping of sounds onto letters and letters onto sounds, as was pointed out in the introduction to these experiments, but the case of R.G. provides conclusive evidence that an inability to convert graphemes into phonemes (R.G. could not read nonwords aloud) does not necessarily entail an inability to write letters down that correspond to speech sounds (R.G. could write down long words and nonwords to dictation, and his spellings were phonologically correct). Thus predictions from theory about the relationship between reading and spelling following neurological insult assume just two things: that there is one orthographic lexicon for reading and for spelling and that there are t\rv indirect routes; one for writing down sounds as letters and one for reading out letters as sounds.
According to traditional dual-process theory then, the following pre- dictions may be made about surface dyslexic spelling:
(1) There should be no priming of nonword spelling by words heard earlier. In other words, surface dyslexics should behave as normals were shown not to behave on this task. The reason for this prediction is that
170 RUTH CAMPBELL
dual-process theory assumes independence of lexical and alexical routes in spelling as in reading.
(2) Spelling should be phonologically accurate. This is because, unless one posits an independent impairment of the indirect spelling route as well as the indirect reading route, there is no reason to believe that “spelling rules” will not be intact in these patients.
A third prediction, which will not be tested directly in this experiment, concerns the spelling of words by surface dyslexics. This should turn out to reveal the locus of their reading impairment. We have already seen that dual-process theory cannot determine whether it is the process of addressing the orthographic lexicon or the lexicon itself which is impaired in surface dyslexia. If a surface dyslexic can spell irregular words accurately, this would suggest his reading impairment reflects access impairment and not an impaired lexicon. If, on the other hand, his word spelling mirrors his word reading, so that, for example, a patient might read YACHT as /jot/ and spell /jot/ as YOT(T), that would indicate that the orthographic entries for such words were lost and that the problem was not just of accessing them.
So much for dual-process predictions of surface dyslexic performance on this task. They are (1) that surface dyslexics should show no word priming effects and (2) that their spellings of nonwords be phonologically accurate.
What are the predictions from the lexical parsing model? Surface dyslexic reading is described by this model as being due to an impairment in the orthographic lexicon, which gives rise to problems in reading words directly (for irregular words may have no entry) and indirectly. The indirect route will be impaired because destruction of the orthographic lexicon in such patients will leave them with an inadequate lexical base for driving the left to right parsing system.
Thus we would predict that in spelling nonwords: (1) Surface dyslexics should show no lexical priming-in contrast to
normal subjects who unequivocally do show such priming. This is because they will have too impaired an orthographic lexicon to show such priming. The situation would be much the same as if we asked a beginning reader to spell /joul/ after hearing “goal” or “soul.” If he does not know how those prime words are spelled he is not likely to spell /joul/ in accordance with them.
(2) We would also predict that, in contrast to dual process predictions, surface dyslexic readers should show impairments in spelling nonwords to dictation, for the only way in which they could achieve such spellings is by driving the left to right parsing procedures on known words. They lack such a base so their spellings-even of nonwords-may be phon- ologically inadequate. One could go further than this and say that, since, on this model, surface dyslexia reflects lexical impairment, and since
WRITING NONWORDS TO DICTATION 171
this is all it reflects, that reading errors and spelling errors should mirror each other in surface dyslexia.
Now it is important to note that the lexical parsing model does not go farther than this. It does not, for instance, allow one to predict that all patients who spell improperly will also read in the same way.
There are five theoretically possible dissociations of reading and spelling according to both the lexical parsing model and the traditional dual- process model. These are
(1) impairment of the direct reading route, (2) impairment of the indirect reading route (lexical parsing or grapheme-
phoneme), (3) impairment of the orthographic lexicon, (4) impairment of the direct spelling route (spelling irregular words). (5) impairment of the indirect spelling route (lexical parsing or grapheme-
phoneme). The strength of the lexical parsing theory is that it predicts that when
(3) is the case, all other impairments follow: while for the traditional dual-process theory if (3) is the case only (1) and (4) follow.
It is possible on either account to have defects that are dissociable which reflect (I), (2), (4), and (5). Indeed, it will now be argued that R.G., the patient thoroughly and carefully described by Beauvois and Derouesne, showed impairments corresponding to (2) and (4). He does not, as they claim. necessarily show a dissociation between lexical reading and alexical spelling, but between direct lexical reading and lexically driven indirect spelling. There is no doubt that R.G. was impaired at reading by the indirect route. Full evidence for this is detailed in Beauvois and Derouesne (1979) and will not be reiterated here. However R.G.‘s spelling is important. R.G. could spell short and long words and nonwords so that they were phonologically acceptable, but they were not always correct.
However, this does not necessarily mean (see the discussion above) that he was using an alexical phoneme-grapheme route in spelling, in contrast to his direct lexical reading. Since his orthographic lexicon was intact, as evidenced by his reading, his spelling could have been lexically driven, though not by the direct route. Indeed most of his spellings strongly suggest that this is the case. R.G.‘s spellings reflected the full richness of French orthography. While one could claim that this simply means that phoneme-grapheme rules are rich and varied, it would be easier to assume them to be lexically driven. Thus, although a medial /z/ in French is usually represented by S as in OSER, PLAISIR, etc., or even Z as in SEIZIEME, is it ever represented by X? R.G. spelled “dixieme” and “sixieme” DIXIEM and SIXIEM. It can surely be argued that such spellings (and this was a near-random example) are better described in terms of lexically driven parsing procedures than in terms
172 RUTH CAMPBELL
of alexical phoneme to grapheme rules. Thus, a patient who has been described as showing a dissociation between lexical processing in reading and alexical processing in spelling is (at least) equally as well described as showing the effects of damage to independent reading and spelling routes with an intact orthographic lexicon.
Having argued that this case need not reflect the dissociations that the authors suggest, it is possible to hold to the predictions from the lexical parsing model concerning surface dyslexic performance on the task of Experiment 1. These were shown to differ from the dual-process predictions in suggesting that surface dyslexic spelling be impaired on this nonword spelling task. This is not predicted on dual-process theory, unless an additional deficit in the use of the alexical spelling route is postulated. Lexical parsing theory predicts that, unlike normal spellers, a surface dyslexic will not show lexical priming for this task. Lexical parsing theory suggests that R.G.‘s spelling will not resemble that of a surface dyslexic. Dual-process theory suggests that it will.
Method The surface dyslexic, E.E., who is more fully described by Coltheart. Masterson, Byng.
and Meara (1982), volunteered to perform Experiment I. It is worth pointing out that, prior to his accident, E.E., a postman. was reasonably literate.’ Examples of his premorbid spelling and reading do not suggest that he would have performed any differently than the students who performed Experiment I. had he performed the task premorbidly.
Since no other surface dyslexics are readily available for investigation, E.E. served as his own control. He performed the experimental task on both list A and list B with a l- week interval between tests.
Although E.E. remembered performing the task on the second testing, his general per- formance did not suggest that he remembered any items from the task. He appeared to have as much difficulty in writing nonwords on the second occasion as he did on the first.
In most respects, testing of E.E. was exactly like the testing of normal subjects in Experiment I. However, the lists were presented to him by the experimenter reading them aloud. rather than on cassette. Three or four rare words were dropped from the list. In all other respects the lists presented to E.E. were the same as those detailed in Experiment I.
Results All of E.E.‘s nonword spellings are shown in Table 4. He had no
difficulty with the auditory lexical decision part of the task, as is clear from his choice of nonwords for spelling. Thus it would appear, as indeed is indicated by E.E.‘s general behavior, that there is no impairment of the auditory lexicon.
‘J. Masterson has kindly provided the following information on E.E.‘s premorbid spelling: in six handwritten letters to his friends and family (approximately 300 words) E.E. made I3 spelling mistakes. Many months after his accident, Masterson tested E.E.‘s spelling of those precise words by asking him to write to dictation the sentences containing the misspelled words. His premorbid misspellings persisted. but many more misspellings, of words that he had previously spelled correctly occurred in this test.
church zete leame garke zalee prone gence scape slume pride churte slame speze chirer
What is also clear is that E.E., in contrast to the normal subjects of Experiment I, failed to show any effects of lexical priming of a word that occurred prior to a spoken nonword on that nonword’s spelling. Just 27% of his nonword spellings resembled the spellings of the primes on the first occasion and just 31% on the second occasion.
The second point to note is that E.E.‘s spellings are very consistent
174 RUTH CAMPBELL
from one week to the next. It seems unlikely that he remembered his spellings, so this consistency would appear to reflect a reliance on a minimal set of rules or of lexical items to drive parsing.
Is there evidence that he is using a lexicon, albeit a very impaired one, to drive his spelling? If this is the case we might expect to find that, even with such minimal priming, the number of component words in a nonword might affect the spelling of the nonword. There does not seem to be any evidence that this is the case-at least not with component words like BOW or OWE in /boup/, iplouzi, or izouli; AIR in /nea/; CRY or RIGHT in /krait/; CURT in /ka:tJ/; EAT in /pri:t/ or zi:t/; FREE in /fri:t/; SLEW or LOOM in /slu:ml; SLEIGH, SLAY, or LAY in /sleim/; EASE, PEES, or PEAS in /spi:zl.
The reader is invited to peruse the table for other examples. There is very little evidence from lexical parsing that E.E. is using an (impaired) orthographic lexicon to “drive” his spelling.
Another aspect of his spelling is that it is often phonetically wrong. This appears to result from two particular problems. The most obvious one is a clear uncertainty about the role of, and necessity for, final “E.” It appears that E.E. uses a strategy that suggests “if in doubt, put an “E” on the end.” Thus nonwords containing short vowels are often spelled with a final “E” (/gram/ > GROME; istapl > STAPE; /prid/ > PRIDE) and “E”‘s may be added, unnecessarily, where the spelling pattern already lengthens the vowel (ZEETE). But also there is a suggestion that E.E. does not know how to spell certain sounds: /Al/ as in “crawl” or “tall” is given ALE spelling. Final /St/ is missing from his spellings of /tJa: st/.
Discussion
E.E., a surface dyslexic, fails to show lexical priming for nonword spelling. Furthermore, his spelling shows little evidence of reliance on lexical components of words in spelling nonwords. In both these respects he differs, markedly, from the normal subjects who performed this experiment.
E.E.‘s spelling is, on the whole, phonologically accurate enough. How- ever, his inability to use final E correctly and some problems with final consonant clusters and “unusual” vowel sounds mean that his spellings are by no means as acceptable as, for instance, R.G.‘s. R.G. made 9% phonological errors (mainly on multisyllabic nonwords). E.E.‘s spellings, even of the short, simple nonwords used in this experiment are only about 60% correct in terms of how his spellings would be spoken.
Thus, the dual-process prediction, that spelling by the indirect route should be essentially the same in R.G. as in E.E.-as long as one posits no further impairments for E.E.-is not upheld. This means that either E.E. suffers a defect in his phoneme-grapheme system in addition to
WRITING NONWORDS TO DICTATION 175
his direct lexical reading impairment, or that the dual-process theory may not provide the most appropriate predictions and descriptions of reading and spelling to dictation.
The lexical parsing theory, on the other hand, predicts the present results quite well. It suggests that, where there is evidence that the orthographic lexicon is impaired, this should manifest itself as problems in both reading and writing nonwords to dictation, and as a failure to show lexical priming in spelling nonwords. Indeed. this is the case in E.E.‘s nonword spelling. One could even say that E.E.‘s spelling problems mirror his reading problems. E.E. has trouble in reading words with final E (Masterson. personal communication). just as he has problems in spelling them.
However, the lexical parsing theory does not fully explain E.E.‘s spelling. If E.E. were able to use .smw (undamaged) parts of his ortho- graphic lexicon-and there is evidence that, following recent therapy, he can read a number of words on sight (Byng; personal communication), he ought to be able to use those words to guide his spelling. Thus, it appears that while E.E. can correctly read AIR, OWE, etc., he clearly does not use them to drive his spellings. One possibility is that, knowing his lexical inadequacy, E.E. chooses, strategically. to use simple phoneme- grapheme correspondences in spelling. This leads, paradoxically enough, to E.E. showing not only correct letters for most consonants but also some context sensitivity tigensi > GENCE). The same paradoxical con- clusion is reached if we assume that, in addition to orthographic destruction. E.E. has impaired lexical parsing skills for spelling. That is, he may have both an impaired orthographic lexicon and an impaired indirect route from the heard to the written word.
On this point, it is instructive to compare the spelling skills of E.E. with those of T.P., a patient described by Patterson and Kay (1982) and by Patterson and Hatfield (1980). This patient, like E.E.. is surface dyslexic (though she also has some letter identification and letter-by-letter reading problems). How does she spell? In confirmation of lexical parsing theory, T.P.‘s spelling indicates an impaired orthographic lexicon. Thus. she was poor at writing words to dictation, particularly when these were irregularly spelled words. However, her poor performance was by no means conjkd to such words and even simple word spelling gave her trouble. As we have seen. dual-process theory does not predict a necessary dissociation between reading and spelling skills. But since two surface dyslexic patients have been described who show a similar problem in reading and in spelling which is not confined to irregularly spelled words, there appear to be even stronger grounds for support of the lexical parsing theory as a preferred description of the likely processes underlying reading and writing.
176 RUTHCAMPBELL
Nevertheless, there are differences in E.E.‘s and in T.P.‘s performance which are not readily explicable by lexical parsing theory. In T.P.‘s case, there are clear indications that her word spelling (nonwords were not examined) shows signs of lexical parsing. Such signs are less apparent in E.E.‘s spelling; though whether this is a real difference, or one which might disappear when both patients are tested with the same material, must await resolution. The possibility that E.E. may be using simple phoneme-grapheme correspondence rules in his spelling cannot be ruled out. What can be ruled out, however, is the possibility that either E.E. or T.P. has access to the rich knowledge of spelling that allowed R.G. to generate varied and phonologically correct spellings.
GENERAL DISCUSSION
Two experiments with normal subjects and one with a surface dyslexic patient suggest that there are pronounced lexical influences in spelling nonwords. That is, normal subjects showed evidence of (a) lexical priming of nonword spelling and (b) lexical parsing of words and of nonwords in their spelling. By contrast, a surface dyslexic patient, E.E., showed evidence of neither of these processes.
It has been argued in this paper that these results support a lexical parsing model of reading and of spelling and not a traditional dual-process model. One point that may now be raised is this: could not a dual process mechanism, revised to take account of lexical sensitivity in writing non- words take care of these new data? Such a revision would simply state that the phoneme-grapheme rules, used in writing new or nonwords, are susceptible to lexical influences. This account would take care of the priming effects reported here but is less satisfactory in accounting for the findings (Experiments 1 and 2) that a good predictor of the spelling of a nonword is the number of component words-in prime and target- revealed by left to right parsing. A revised dual-process theory would predict that the frequency of occurence of a particular grapheme for a phoneme (subject to word position constraints) should be the main de- terminant of a nonword’s spelling; not the spelling patterns of words embedded in the nonword. Of course, in the present experiments these may have been confounded and this aspect of the data requires further well-controlled investigation.
As far as neurologically impaired reading is concerned, the most im- portant aspect of the lexical parsing model is that it predicts that, where there is evidence of impairment to the orthographic lexicon, neither reading nor writing; neither irregular, regular, nor nonwords will be spared. A revised dual-process theory cannot handle this well. Evidence is provided by Masterson (1982) that E.E.‘s reading of nonwords (his spelling was not tested) is not adequately explained in terms of impaired phoneme-grapheme rule use. How then could such a patient read or
WRITING NONWORDS TO DICTATION 177
spell? One possibility is that he might use his intact ~ruciitor.v lexicon to generate possible letter-sound correspondences. Such correspondences can never reflect the full range of orthographic possibilities, but there is no reason why simple phoneme-grapheme correspondence rules should not be available through auditory lexical parsing. Since these patients appear to be able to segment speech sounds into their component parts. assigning letters to those sounds (and vice versa for spelling), such simple effects may reflect auditor~lacoltstj~ rather than graphemic correspond- ences. It certainly appears (see Coltheart et al., 1982) that surface dyslexic reading proceeds by sounding out letters and checking the results against an auditory representation that might fit.
Reliance on the auditory lexicon would appear to be characteristic of normal spelling to some extent; this is witnessed by the common problem of good readers who are bad spellers (see Frith, 1979,198O). But the important aspect of spelling, apart from the the phonologically correct spellings of poor spellers, is that normal spelling is rarely neologistic. It appears that the orthographic lexicon exerts a check on the proposed orthography, wherever the proposed spelling originated. As we have seen in Experiments I and 2 this is a powerful force, and one that is not predicted by traditional dual-process theory that claims that lexical and alexical processes in reading and writing can be clearly separated.
One implication of the proposal that there may be graphemic links with the auditory lexicon is that students who learn phonetic transcription codes for spoken speech may be in a similar position to E.E. and T.P. That is, they might use phonetically based, rather than lexically based, graphemes for representing items that should be lexically written. When the task of Experiment 1 was informally attempted on a trained speech therapist she showed no sign of lexical parsing, nor of lexical priming in her spelling. In other words. the letter forms that she used appeared to derive from phonetic transcriptions of the sounds that she heard rather than from lexical transcriptions. This “hidden orthography” deserves further study. The choice of a particular orthographic item may reflect the use of manifestly different sources. English writing contains letters that stand for speech sounds and for seen word parts-the two may sometimes be separated and perhaps E.E.‘s performance points toward this separation.
REFERENCES Allport, D. A., & Funnell, E. 1981. Components of the mental lexicon Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society of London, B 295, 397-410. Baker, R. G. 1980. Orthographic awareness. In U. Frith (Ed.). Cogniti\ze processes in
spekng. New York/London: Academic Press. Barron. R. W. 1980. Visual and phonological strategies in reading and spelling. In U. Frith
(Ed.). Cogniti\,e proc’esses in spelliny. New York: Academic Press. Beauvois. M. F.. & Dtrouesnt!. J. 1979. Phonological alexia: Three dissociations. JO,, ~7t7/
of Nearology. Ne~rrosffrgery trnd Psychitrrry. 42, I I IS- I 124.
178 RUTH CAMPBELL
Beauvois, M. F., & DCrouesnt, J. 1981. Lexical or orthographic agraphia. Brcrin. 104, 21- 49.
Coltheart, M. 1978. Lexical access in simple reading tasks. In G. Underwood (Ed.). Strategies of information processing. New York/London: Academic Press.
Coltheart, M., Masterson, J., Byng, S.. & Meara. P. 1982. The psycholinguistic analysis of aquired dyslexias. Philosophical Transactions of the Roval Society of London,
Ellis, A. W. 1982. Spelling and writing and reading and speaking. In A. W. Ellis (Ed.), Norrnulity und pathology in cognitive .fitnction. New York/London: Academic Press.
Frith, U. 1979. Reading by eye and writing by ear. In P. A. Kolers, M. Wrolstad, & H. Bouma (Eds.), Processing of visible language I. New York: Plenum.
Frith, U. 1980. Unexpected spelling problems. In U. Frith (Ed.), Cogniti\,e processes in
spelling. New York/London: Academic Press. Glushko, R. J. 1979. The organisation and activation of orthographic knowledge in reading
aloud. Journal qf Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Pe&rmance, 5,
674-69 I. Henderson. L. 1982. Orthography and word recognition in reading. New York/London:
Academic Press. Henderson, L. & Chard, J. 1980. The readers’ implicit knowledge of orthographic structure.
in U. Frith (Ed.), Cognitive processes in spelling. New York/London: Academic Press. Holmes, J. M. 1973. Dyslexia: A neurolinguistic study of traumatic and developmental
disorders of reading. Ph.D. thesis, University of Edinburgh. Jakimik. J.. Cole, R., & Rudniky, A. I. 1980. The injuence qfspellingon speech perception.
Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, St. Louis. MO. Nov. 22. Kay, J. & Marcel, T. 1981. One process not two in reading aloud: Lexical analogies do
the work of nonlexical rules. Quarter/y JorrrnuI of Experimental Psychology. 33(a), 397-4 13.
Marcel, T. 1980. Surface dyslexia and beginning reading: A revised hypothesis of the pronunciation of print and its impairments. In M. Coltheart, K. Patterson & J. C. Marshall (Eds.), Deep dyslexia London: Routledge.
Masterson, J. 1982. On hog. H’e read non Msords. Meeting on Surface Dyslexia. Oxford (UK).
Marsh. G., Friedman, M., Welch. V., & Desberg. P. 1980. The development of strategies in spelling. In U. Frith (Ed.). Cognitive processes in spelling. New York/London: Academic Press.
Morton, J. & Patterson, K. 1980. Deep dyslexia: A new attempt at an interpretation. In M. Coltheart, K. Patterson, &J. C. Marshall (Eds.). Deep dyslexia New York/London: Academic Press.
Morton, J. 1980. The Logogen model and orthographic structure. In U. Frith (Ed.). Cognitive processes in spelling. New York/London: Academic Press.
Nelson. H. 1980. Analysis of spelling errors in normal and dyslexic children. In U. Frith (Ed.), Cognitive processes in spelling. New York/London: Academic Press.
Newcombe, F. & Marshall, J. C. 1973. Patterns of paralexia: A psycholinguistic approach. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 2, 175-200.
Patterson, K. E., & Hatfield, F. M. 1980. Surface dysgraphia: Parallels with and divergencies from surface dyslexia. Paper to the Experimental Psychology Society, Cambridge.
Patterson, K. E., & Kay, J. 1982. Letter by letter reading: Psychological descriptions of a neurological syndrome. Quarterly Journal qf Experimental Psychology,
Seymour, P. H. K., & Porpodas, C. 1980. Lexical and non lexical processing of spelling in dyslexia. In U. Frith (Ed.). Cognititxe processe.s in spelling. New York/London: Academic Press.
WIJk, A. 1966. The rules c?fpronrtn~iution.for the english language. London: Oxford Univ. Press.
