Attentional strategic control over nonlexical and lexical processing in written spelling to dictation in adults

We conducted four experiments to investigate whether adults can exert attentional strategic control over non lexical and lexical processing in written spelling to dictation. In Experiment 1, regular and irregular words were produced either in a non word context (regular and irregular non words) or in a word context (high-frequency regular and irregular words), whereas in Experiment 2, the same set of words was produced either in a regular non word or in an irregular low-frequency word context. Experiment 3 was a replication of Experiment 2 but with increased manipulation of the context. In Experiment 4, participants had to produce either under time pressure or in response to standard written spelling instructions. Regularity effects were found in all the experiments, but their size was not reliably affected by manipulations intended to increase or decrease reliance on non lexical processing. More particularly, the results from Experiment 4 show that adults can speed up the initialization of their writing responses to a substantial degree without altering regularity effects on either latencies or spelling errors. Our findings suggest that, although adults are able to generate an internal deadline criterion of when to initialize the writing responses, non lexical processing is a mandatory process that is not subject to attentional strategic control in written spelling to dictation.