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Spelling And Reading Novel Homophones: Testing The Value Of Lexical Distinctiveness, Jayde Homer

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Lexical distinctiveness, according to which a written form represents one and only one morpheme, is a feature of some writing systems. For example, ‹bear› and ‹bare› are spelled differently in English. In two experiments, we asked whether readers and spellers of English benefit from distinctive spellings of homophones. In Experiment 1, university students listened to 40 passages, each containing a novel homophone (e.g., /kel/ used to mean a gossip-lover). In Experiment 2, participants read the passages. Half of the novel homophones were homographic (e.g., ‹kale›), and half were heterographic (e.g., ‹kail›). In both experiments, participants answered questions about the novel …