Unexpectedly Poor Spelling in University Students

Abstract

University students who were unexpectedly poor spellers relative to above average spellers revealed less extensive word-specific knowledge in their misspellings but not inferior knowledge of phoneme-grapheme correspondences, indicating that many of their orthographic representations lack word-specific graphemic information. Performance on deceptive nonwords in a printed lexical decision task showed that the poorer spellers did not place particular reliance on word beginnings as the basis for identification. However, because they could classify accurately many words for which they did not know the precise spelling, they may make greater use of partial cues when identifying words. They were al..