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Noun or verb? Adult readers' sensititivity to spelling cues to grammatical category in word endings

journal contribution
posted on 2023-05-17, 01:06 authored by Nenagh KempNenagh Kemp, Nilsson, J, Arciuli, J
The spelling of many disyllabic English word endings holds cues to their grammatical category, beyond obvious inflectional endings such as -ing for verbs. For example, some letter sequences are clearly associated with nouns (e.g., -oon) and others with verbs (e.g., -erge). This study extended recent research by Arciuli and Cupples (2006), and confirmed that skilled adult readers are sensitive to these orthographic cues. It was found that adults were more likely to treat pseudowords as nouns when they had noun-like endings than verb-like or control endings, and more likely to treat pseudowords as verbs when they had verb-like than noun-like endings. This sensitivity held across three tasks (sentence construction, sentence judgement, and pseudoword judgement), which required increasingly explicit awareness of the way that cues could allow grammatical categorisation. In some tasks sensitivity to verb-like endings was related to reading ability, although not to spelling ability or grammatical awareness. Implications for our understanding of language processing are discussed. © 2008 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.

History

Publication title

Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal

Volume

22

Issue

6

Pagination

661-685

ISSN

0922-4777

Department/School

School of Psychological Sciences

Publisher

Springer

Place of publication

Netherlands

Repository Status

  • Restricted

Socio-economic Objectives

Learner and learning not elsewhere classified

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    University Of Tasmania

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