Spelling errors respect morphology: a corpus study of Hebrew orthography

Amalia Bar-On*, Victor Kuperman

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

15 Scopus citations

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.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1107-1128
Number of pages22
JournalReading and Writing
Volume32
Issue number5
DOIs
StatePublished - 15 May 2019

Funding

FundersFunder number
Canada Foundation for Innovation Leaders Opportunity Fund
Lady Davis Visiting Professorship at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of CanadaRGPIN/402395-2012 415
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada895-2016-1008
Canada Research Chairs

    Keywords

    • Corpus study
    • Hebrew
    • Morphology
    • Orthography
    • Spelling

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