Abstract
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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Notes
We use Capital Latin Letters, together with their Hebrew counterparts, to transcribe the Hebrew orthography.
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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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
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-018-9902-1