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Abstract:
In earlier research we demonstrated (Sandra, Frisson &
Daems, 1999) that homophonous verb forms cause spelling errors even
among experienced writers of Dutch and that the directionality of
this interference is conditioned by the frequency relationship
between the members of the homophonous pair. This situation obtains
even though the verb forms themselves have a simple morphographic
spelling pattern (stem plus suffix). The present experiments show
that the magnitude of this frequency-based interference effect is
consistently modulated by several sentential factors. We
manipulated three factors: (i) the distance _ in number of words _
between the verb form and the subject, (ii) the order of subject
and verb (SV or VS), and (iii) the presence or absence of an
intervening noun whose grammatical features conflict with the
subject (cf. Hartsuiker, Anton-Mendez, & van Zee, submitted).
All three of these sentential factors affected the error rates in a
spelling-to-dictation task. We found an increase in number of
errors for (i) the long SV distance, (ii) the inverted VS order,
and (iii) an intervening noun with conflicting grammatical
information. Taken together these findings reveal that the spelling
process of fully regular verb forms inevitably activates stored
orthographic representations corresponding to the phonological
pattern of the verb form (hence the interference of homophonous
forms) but also triggers a process which implements the spelling
rule, whose speed is related to the accessibility of the relevant
grammatical features of the subject. Sentential factors which act
to slow down this access process (i.e. all those included in our
experiments) offer more room for the error prone retrieval process
and hence increase the number of errors.
Hartsuiker, R. J., Anton-Mendez, I., & M. van Zee
(submitted). Object attraction in subject-verb agreement
construction.
Sandra, D., Frisson, S. & F. Daems (1999). Wy simple verb
forms can be so difficult to spell: The influence of homophone
frequency and distance in Dutch. Brain and Language, 68,
277-283.
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