A Study On The Interaction Between Lexical And Sublexical Information In English Spelling

The present study is intended to investigate the interaction between lexical and sublexicalinformation in Chinese English learners’ spelling by E-prime to test their spelling of nonwordsunder different lexical priming. DRM of spelling (Coltheart,1978) suggests that in normal readers’writing to dictation (it is referred to as spelling in this paper), there exist (at least) two processes fortransferring between phonology and orthography: a memory-based lexical route and an assembledsound–to–spelling-conversion sublexical route.A psycholinguistic software E-prime was employed to test the lexical priming effectintervened by unrelated items between the prime words and target nonwords in Chinese learners’English spelling.150graduates majoring in English from Ningbo University (139female and11male; mean age=23.6years) participated in the experiment with30in each group:30in controlgroup and120in experiment groups (4subgroups of30). They were required to choose thespelling pattern for each target nonword using the first spelling that comes into their mind. Subjectsin the control group were only provided with nonwords, while the experiment groups were offeredsets of prime words (of high-and low-contingency) and target nonwords with or without theintervening unrelated nonwords in between (i.e., four conditions: A: high-contingency,non-intervened; B: low contingency, non-intervened; C: high-contingency, with intervening; and D:low-contingency, with intervening). Results indicated the lexical priming effect was strong (p＜.01), and the effect was larger for low-(62.7%－35.3%) than for high-contingency (79.6%－64.7%) spellings. Results also showed that priming diminished under the interference of anunrelated word between the prime word and target nonword and did so more for the production oflow-(27.4%－4.4%) than for high-contingency (14.9%－4.5%) spellings.