WHAT DO WE LEARN FROM MISTAKES: PROCESSING DIFFICULTIES WITH FREQUENTLY MISSPELLED WORDS

Even if we know how to spell, we often see words misspelled by other people — especially nowadays when we constantly read unedited texts on social media and in personal messages. In this paper, we present two experiments showing that the incidence of orthographic errors reduces the quality of lexical representations in the mental lexicon—even if one knows how to spell a word, repeated exposure to incorrect spellings blurs its orthographical representation and weakens the connection between form and meaning. As a result, it is more difficult to judge whether the word is spelled correctly, and — more surprisingly — it takes more time to read the word even when there are no errors. We show that when all other factors are balanced the effect of misspellings is more pronounced for the words with lower frequency. We compare our results with the only previous study addressing the problem of misspellings’ influence on the processing of correctly spelled words — it was conducted on the English data. It may be interesting to explore this issue in a cross-linguistic perspective. In this study, we turn to Russian, which differs from English by a more transparent orthography. Much larger corpora of unedited texts are available for English than for Russian, but, using a different way to estimate the incidence of misspellings, we obtained similar results and could also make some novel generalizations. In Experiment 1 we selected 44 words that are frequently misspelled and presented in two conditions (with or without spelling errors) and were distributed across two experimental lists. For every word, participants were asked to determine whether it is spelled correctly or not. The frequency of the word and the relative frequency of its misspelled occurrences significantly influenced the number of incorrect responses: not only it takes longer to read frequently misspelled words, it is also more difficult to decide whether they are spelled correctly. In Experiment 2 we selected 30 words from the materials of Experiment 1 and for every selected word, we found a pair that is matched for length and frequency, but is rarely misspelled due to its orthographic transparency. We used a lexical decision task, presenting these 60 words in the correct spelling, as well as 60 nonwords. We used LMMs for statistics. Firstly, the word type factor was significant: it takes more time to recognize a frequently misspelled word, which replicates the results obtained for English. Secondly, the interaction between the word type factor and the frequency factor was significant: the effect of misspellings was more pronounced for the words of lower frequency. We can conclude that high frequency words have more robust representations that resist blurring more efficiently than low frequency ones. Finally, we conducted a separate analysis showing that the number of incorrect responses in Experiment 1 correlates with RTs in Experiment 2. Thus, whether we consciously try to find an error or simply read words orthographic representations blurred due to exposure to frequent misspellings make the task more difficult.