TY - JOUR
T1 - Prevalence of Spelling Errors Affects Reading Behavior Across Languages
AU - Kuperman, Victor
AU - Bar-On, Amalia
AU - Bertram, Raymond
AU - Boshra, Rober
AU - Deutsch, Avital
AU - Kyröläinen, Aki Juhani
AU - Mathiopoulou, Barbara
AU - Oralova, Gaisha
AU - Protopapas, Athanassios
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2021. American Psychological Association
PY - 2021
Y1 - 2021
N2 - This cross-linguistic study investigated the impact of spelling errors on reading behavior in five languages (Chinese, English, Finnish, Greek, and Hebrew). Learning theories predict that correct and incorrectspelling alternatives (e.g., “tomorrow” and “tommorrow”) provide competing cues to the sound andmeaning of a word: The closer the alternatives are to each other in their frequency of occurrence, themore uncertain the reader is regarding the spelling of that word. An information-theoretic measure ofentropy was used as an index of uncertainty. Based on theories of learning, we predicted that higher entropywould lead to slower recognition of words even when they are spelled correctly. This predictionwas confirmed in eye-tracking sentence-reading experiments in five languages widely variable in theirwriting systems’ phonology and morphology.
AB - This cross-linguistic study investigated the impact of spelling errors on reading behavior in five languages (Chinese, English, Finnish, Greek, and Hebrew). Learning theories predict that correct and incorrectspelling alternatives (e.g., “tomorrow” and “tommorrow”) provide competing cues to the sound andmeaning of a word: The closer the alternatives are to each other in their frequency of occurrence, themore uncertain the reader is regarding the spelling of that word. An information-theoretic measure ofentropy was used as an index of uncertainty. Based on theories of learning, we predicted that higher entropywould lead to slower recognition of words even when they are spelled correctly. This predictionwas confirmed in eye-tracking sentence-reading experiments in five languages widely variable in theirwriting systems’ phonology and morphology.
KW - Cross-linguistic studies
KW - Eye movements
KW - Learning
KW - Reading
KW - Spelling
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85107825974&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1037/xge0001038
DO - 10.1037/xge0001038
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AN - SCOPUS:85107825974
SN - 0096-3445
VL - 150
SP - 1974
EP - 1993
JO - Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
JF - Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
IS - 10
ER -
