Seeing Spelling Isn’t Enough


Alisha Tabassum 1

Shazia Ali1 Helene Slaattelid Øya1 Sofia Tsitsopoulou1 Jens Roeser1

1 Nottingham Institute of Psychology, Nottingham Trent University

Introduction

  • Writers must decide what to mention first and when to begin typing while retrieving spellings for upcoming words (Flower & Hayes, 1980; Roeser et al., 2019).
  • Spelling difficulty may affect written sentence production before the difficult word is typed, during the word, or downstream in later sentence regions.
  • We ask whether spelling difficulty affects word order or emerges during real-time production.

Methods

Task

Participants completed a sentence production task with spelling prompts.

Schematic trial flow for an example trial.

Figure 1: Schematic trial flow for an example trial.

Participants

  • Broad analysis sample: 164 participants after excluding 1 pre-specified participant record.
  • Time-course model: 120 participants and 4,232 trials after response/time-course eligibility filters.
  • Age: 34.2 years on average (SD = 8.6, range 18-50).

Design

Target-image spelling diversity was manipulated within item: high diversity vs low diversity.

Table 1: Spelling-diversity calculation for one high-diversity target item.
Spelling alternative Frequency Proportion Spelling diversity
colander 30 40.5% 2.44
collander 16 21.6%
collinder 13 17.6%
colinder 7 9.5%
calender 1 1.4%
caulinder 1 1.4%
colandor 1 1.4%
colender 1 1.4%
colindar 1 1.4%
colonder 1 1.4%
colunder 1 1.4%
culinder 1 1.4%
  • Spelling-prompt alignment was manipulated with correct, plausible, and incorrect prompts.
  • Spatial arrangements placed the target at 3, 9, 12, or 6 o’clock, creating horizontal next to trials and vertical above/below trials; horizontal trials allowed either left-to-right or right-to-left descriptions.
Table 2: Example item sets crossing spelling diversity, spelling prompt, and other object.
Item High-diversity target High prompts Low-diversity target Low prompts Other object
1 piranha correct: piranha
plausible: pirahna
incorrect: prianha 		jellyfish correct: jellyfish
plausible: jelyfish
incorrect: jellyfihs 		swing
2 pomegranate correct: pomegranate
plausible: pomegranite
incorrect: poemgranate 		watermelon correct: watermelon
plausible: watermelan
incorrect: waetrmelon 		saw
3 meringue correct: meringue
plausible: merangue
incorrect: merignue 		biscuit correct: biscuit
plausible: biscuitt
incorrect: bsicuit 		watch
4 colander correct: colander
plausible: collander
incorrect: colanedr 		bagpipes correct: bagpipes
plausible: bagpieps
incorrect: bapgipes 		pear
  • 48 item sets and 24 filler pairs per list.
  • Counterbalancing crossed spelling diversity, spelling prompt, and target position within item.
  • Images came from Rossion and Pourtois (2004); fillers used unrelated diagonal-prime trials.

Results

Spelling Decision

Plausible spellings were accepted much more often for high-diversity than low-diversity targets. Aligned means correct or plausible prompts accepted.

Spelling-prompt acceptance and spelling-decision time by spelling diversity.

Figure 2: Spelling-prompt acceptance and spelling-decision time by spelling diversity.

Horizontal Starting Direction

Writers showed a strong left-to-right ordering bias in design-relevant horizontal trials (99.6-100.0%; 95% PI lower bounds ≥ 98.6%), so spelling difficulty and priming did not change word-order choices. The filler exception was lower-left starts: 66.0% left-to-right, 95% PI [54.0, 76.6].

Hesitation Probability

  • Hesitation probabilities were modelled across sentence positions (Roeser et al., 2024, 2025).
  • High-diversity spellings increased hesitation mainly at sentence-internal positions around the noun and location word. When writers began with the unprimed image, the effect shifted downstream to the determiner/second-noun region, suggesting knock-on effects for later word retrieval.
High-minus-low diversity hesitation probability across horizontal and vertical trials.

Figure 3: High-minus-low diversity hesitation probability across horizontal and vertical trials.

Conclusion

  • Early spelling difficulty produced downstream hesitation, suggesting knock-on effects on later word retrieval.
  • This effect was not reduced by prior spelling preview: preferred spellings still disrupted later typing.
  • Reading a word immediately before production therefore did not support spelling retrieval during writing.

References

Flower, L. S., & Hayes, J. R. (1980). The dynamics of composing: Making plans and juggling constraints. In L. W. Gregg & E. R. Steinberg (Eds.), Cognitive processes in writing: An interdisciplinary approach (pp. 31–50). Lawrence Erlbaum.
Roeser, J., Conijn, R., Chukharev, E., Ofstad, G. H., & Torrance, M. (2025). Typing in tandem: Language planning in multisentence text production is fundamentally parallel. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 154(7), 1824–1854. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001759
Roeser, J., De Maeyer, S., Leijten, M., & VaWaes, L. (2024). Modelling typing disfluencies as finite mixture process. Reading and Writing, 37(2), 359–384. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-021-10203-z
Roeser, J., Torrance, M., & Baguley, T. (2019). Advance planning in written and spoken sentence production. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 45(11), 1983–2009. https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0000685
Rossion, B., & Pourtois, G. (2004). Revisiting Snodgrass and Vanderwart’s object pictorial set: The role of surface detail in basic-level object recognition. Perception, 33(2), 217–236. https://doi.org/10.1068/p5117

Spelling difficulty persists into the time course of sentence production.