What is a morphological spelling error?

The paper aims to account for linguistic and processing factors responsible for the incidence of spelling errors in Hebrew. The theoretical goal is to disentangle a complex interaction between morphology, phonology, and orthography in production of written words. We focused on a specific spelling error in Hebrew: an overt representation of the word-internal segment/i/by the letter Y (י). This Y-insertion goes against the prescriptive spelling rules (cf. substandard MYRPST מירפסת vs conventional MRPST מרפסת,/miʁpeset/‘balcony’) and yet in our data it affects 25% of nouns with an appropriate phonological environment. Corpus analyses of unedited texts further revealed that errors proliferated in lower-frequency words, but their occurrence was much less likely if it would disrupt a morphological unit. These results point to morphology and statistical patterns of language use in Hebrew as major mechanisms driving orthographic learning: the paper discusses repercussions of our findings for theories of reading.

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Fig. 1

What is a morphological spelling error?

Fig. 2

What is a morphological spelling error?

Fig. 3

What is a morphological spelling error?

Notes

  1. We use Capital Latin Letters, together with their Hebrew counterparts, to transcribe the Hebrew orthography.

  2. Note that Hebrew is written from right to left.

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Acknowledgements

Victor Kuperman’s contribution was partially supported by the Canadian Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Discovery Grant RGPIN/402395-2012 415 (Kuperman, PI), the Ontario Early Researcher award (Kuperman, PI), the Canada Research Chair (Tier 2; Kuperman, PI), the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Partnership Training Grant 895-2016-1008 (Libben, PI), the Canada Foundation for Innovation Leaders Opportunity Fund (Kuperman, PI), and the Lady Davis Visiting Professorship at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Communication Disorders, School of Health Sciences, Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel

    Amalia Bar-On

  2. Department of Linguistics and Languages, McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada

    Victor Kuperman

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  1. Amalia Bar-On

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  2. Victor Kuperman

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Correspondence to Amalia Bar-On.

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Bar-On, A., Kuperman, V. Spelling errors respect morphology: a corpus study of Hebrew orthography. Read Writ 32, 1107–1128 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-018-9902-1

What is a morphological spelling?

Morphology is the study of words and their parts. Morphemes, like prefixes, suffixes and base words, are defined as the smallest meaningful units of meaning. Morphemes are important for phonics in both reading and spelling, as well as in vocabulary and comprehension.

What is phonological spelling error?

Phonological problems refer to errors in which the misspelled word does not sound like the target word because the whole word, a consonant, a vowel, a syllable, a prefix, a suffix, a grapheme or a grapheme cluster was not heard at all, was misheard, was added, or reversed with another.

What are the different types of spelling error?

In the samples below, the spelling errors from a student's writing are assembled into three broad categories: phonological (phonetically inaccurate), orthographic (phonetically plausible but inaccurate), and morphologic/syntactic.

What is the difference between phonological and orthographic errors?

Phonological enemies were defined as the number of words with similar spelling but different pronunciation of the rhyme and orthographic enemies were defined as the number of words with similar pronunciation but different spelling of the rime.