Spelling is a difficult task, particularly in orthographies where letters and sounds do not have one-to-one correspondence. In English, for example, vowel sounds can be spelled in as many as five different ways. In line with evidence that we do not just memorize difficult spellings, my work has been investigating spellers’ sensitivity to untaught spelling rules and patterns.

-Can young spellers pick up on untaught orthographic conventions such as “gz is an illegal spelling of a frequent word-final sound combination in English; *bagz” from simple text exposure?

-If so, what are the computational mechanisms at play?

I address these questions within artificial lexicons which exemplify spelling patterns akin to those seen in real orthographies. So far, I have shown that frequency statistics have an influence on children’s spelling preferences: For example, young spellers rapidly learn and generalize over novel orthographic conventions for permissible letter contexts (e.g., d and o cannot occur next to one another) (Samara & Caravolas, 2014) both when these are embedded within rime units (i.e., vowel-plus-final-consonant units) and body units (i.e., initial consonant plus-vowel units) (Samara, Singh, & Wonnacott, 2019). Other ongoing work with collaborators Elizabeth Wonnacott and Daniela Singh compares children’s and adults’ ability to learn patterns under explicit and implicit instructions (Singh, Wonnacott, & Samara, 2021) and the longevity of lab-induced orthographic learning (Samara et al., in preparation). An overview of this work is given in this recent presentation at the CREL seminar series.