Adult spelling strategies

Abstract

The goal of this study was to investigate how adult English speakers, who are good readers, but who differ in spelling ability, remember word-specific spelling information. In the first experiment, participants learned the spellings of words they had previously misspelled, while "thinking out loud". The main strategies observed in order of popularity were: letter rehearsal, overpronunciation, comparison of the remembered and the correct spelling, morphological analysis and visualisation. All strategies produced good learning success for the better spellers, but weaker spellers had less success with overpronunciation, comparison and morphological analysis. In a second experiment, when partici..