WORD-SPECIFIC KNOWLEDGE, WORD-RECOGNITION STRATEGIES, AND SPELLING ABILITY

The study investigated good and poor adult spellers. Idiosyncratic words whose spellings require word-specific knowledge were those which most clearly discriminated between the groups in spelling production (Experiment 1). In the lexical decision task, poor spellers often made their decisions on the basis of a partial analysis of the letter sequence (Experiments 2 and 3). While poor spellers were just as good as good spellers in matching symbol and random consonant sequences, they were worse at matching word and nonword stimuli (Experiment 4). The results indicate that poor spellers′ inefficient processing is confined to orthographically structured stimuli. It is argued that their failure to retain detailed knowledge of spellings results from their partial-analysis strategy of word recognition. © 1993 Academic Press, Inc.