Search

International audience; Several dictionary websites are available on the web to access semantic, synonymous, or spelling information about a given word. During nine years, we systematically recorded all the entered letter sequences from a French web dictionary. A total of 200 million ortho-graphic forms were obtained allowing us to create a large-scale database of spelling errors that could inform psychological theories about spelling processes. To check the reliability of this big data methodology, we selected from this database a sample of 100 frequently misspelled words. A group of 100 French university students had to perform a spelling-to-dictation test on this list of words. The results showed a strong correlation between the two data sets on the frequencies of produced spellings (r = 0.82). Although the distributions of spelling errors were relatively consistent across the two databases, the proportion of correct responses revealed significant differences. Regression analyses allowed us to generate possible explanations for these differences in terms of task-dependent factors. We argue that comparing the results of these large-scale databases with those of standard and controlled experimental paradigms is certainly a good way to determine the conditions under which this big data methodology can be adequately used for informing psychological theories.

We examined whether French children in Grades 3 and 5 (aged ∼ 8–11 years) benefit from morphological relatedness beyond orthographic relatedness in the implicit learning of new spellings. Children silently read stories that included two target nonwords. One nonword was in an opaque condition in that nothing in the story could justify the spelling of its final sound. The other nonword was in either a morphological condition (for children in the morphological group) or an orthographic condition (for children in the orthographic group). In the morphological condition, the final spelling of the target nonword was justified by two morphologically related nonwords. For example, coirardage, obtained by adding the suffix age to coirard, designates the coirard’s song and justifies the final silent d of coirard. The orthographic condition included two nonwords that were orthographically but not morphologically related to the target. For example, the coirard’s song was coirardume, obtained by adding ume, which is not a suffix, to coirard. Then, 30 min after reading the stories, children were asked to choose the correct spelling of each nonword from among three phonologically plausible alternatives (e.g., coirard, coirars, coirar). In the morphological group, both third and fifth graders more often selected the correct spellings for items presented in the morphological condition than for items presented in the opaque condition. In the orthographic group, the results were very similar in the opaque and orthographic conditions. The findings show that the benefit of morphological relatedness in the implicit learning of new spellings cannot be reduced to orthographic relatedness.

Three experiments investigated whether and how the learning of spelling by French university students is influenced by the graphotactic legitimacy of the spellings. Participants were exposed to three types of novel spellings: AB, which do not contain doublets (e.g., guprane); AAB, with a doublet before a single consonant, which is legitimate in French (e.g., gupprane); and ABB, with a doublet after a single consonant, which is illegitimate (e.g., guprrane). In Experiment 1, the nonwords were embedded within texts that participants read for meaning. In Experiment 2, participants read the nonwords in isolation, with or without instruction to memorize their spellings; they copied the nonwords in Experiment 3. In all of these conditions, AB and AAB spellings were learned more readily than ABB spellings. Although participants were highly knowledgeable about the illegitimacy of ABB spellings, the orthographic distinctiveness of these spellings did not make them easier to recall than legitimate spellings. When recalling ABB spellings, participants sometimes made transposition errors, doubling the wrong consonant of a cluster (e.g., spelling gupprane instead of guprrane). Participants almost never transposed the doubling for AAB items. Transposition errors, biased in the direction of replacing illegitimate with legitimate orthographic patterns, show that graphotactic knowledge influences memory for specific items. An analysis of the spellings produced in the copy phase and final recall test of Experiment 3 further suggests that transposition errors resulted not so much from reconstructive processes at the time of recall but from reconstructive processes or inefficient encoding at earlier points.

In an associative recognition task, distractors generally consist of a rearrangement of the items composing the study pairs. This makes it possible that processing the distractors generates retroactive interference on memory for the study pairs. In Experiment 1, we explored this possibility in a yes/no recognition test concerning previously learned arbitrary associations between visual symbols and auditory syllables. Rearranged pairs had a deleterious impact on the accuracy and the speed of responses to related correct pairs. This effect did not vary as a function of the number of training blocks, and furthermore, in Experiment 2, the same effect was observed for overlearned small multiplication facts. These results suggest that exposure to potentially confounding information generates interference even if this information is known to be incorrect. Some implications are outlined, especially with regard to the widespread use of multiple-choice tests in knowledge evaluation.

In French, the transcription of the same sound can be guided by both probabilistic graphotactic constraints (e.g., /epsilon t/ is more often transcribed ette after -v than after -f) and morphological constraints (e.g., /epsilon t/ is always transcribed ette when used as a diminutive suffix). Three experiments showed that pseudo-word spellings of 8-to 11-year-old children and adults were influenced by both types of constraints. The influence of graphotactic regularities persisted when reliance on morphological rules was possible, without any falling off as a function of age. This suggests that rules are not abstracted, even after massive amounts of exposure to a rule-based material. These results can be accounted for by a statistical model of implicit learning.

Pacton and Perruchet (2008) reported that participants who were asked to process adjacent elements located within a sequence of digits learned adjacent dependencies but did not learn nonadjacent dependencies and conversely, participants who were asked to process nonadjacent digits learned nonadjacent dependencies but did not learn adjacent dependencies. In the present study, we showed that when participants were simply asked to read aloud the same sequences of digits, a task demand that did not require the intentional processing of specific elements as in standard statistical learning tasks, only adjacent dependencies were learned. The very same pattern was observed when digits were replaced by syllables. These results show that the perfect symmetry found in Pacton and Perruchet was not due to the fact that the processing of digits is less sensitive to their distance than the processing of syllables, tones, or visual shapes used in most statistical learning tasks. Moreover, the present results, completed with a reanalysis of the data collected in Pacton and Perruchet (2008), demonstrate that participants are highly sensitive to violations involving the spacing between paired elements. Overall, these results are consistent with the Pacton and Perruchet's single-process account of adjacent and nonadjacent dependencies, in which the joint attentional processing of the two events is a necessary and sufficient condition for learning the relation between them, irrespective of their distance. However, this account should be completed to encompass the notion that the presence or absence of an intermediate event is an intrinsic component of the representation of an association.

International audience; Adults often learn to spell words during the course of reading for meaning, without intending to do so. We used an incidental learning task in order to study this process. Spellings that contained double n, r and t which are common doublets in French, were learned more readily by French university students than spellings that contained less common but still legal doublets. When recalling or recognizing the latter, the students sometimes made transposition errors, doubling a consonant that often doubles in French rather than the consonant that was originally doubled (e.g., tiddunar recalled as tidunnar). The results, found in three experiments using different nonwords and different types of instructions, show that people use general knowledge about the graphotactic patterns of their writing system together with word-specific knowledge to reconstruct spellings that they learn from reading. These processes contribute to failures and successes in memory for spellings, as in other domains.

In 5 experiments, results showed that when participants are faced with materials embedding relations between both adjacent and nonadjacent elements, they learn exclusively the type of relations they had to actively process in order to meet the task demands, irrespective of the spatial contiguity of the paired elements. These results are consonant with current theories positing that attention is a necessary condition for learning. More important, the results provide support for a more radical conception, in which the joint attentional processing of 2 events is also a sufficient condition for learning the relation between them. The well-documented effect of contiguity could be a by-product of the fact that attention generally focuses on contiguous events. This reappraisal considerably extends the scope of approaches based on associative or statistical processes.

The domain-general learning mechanisms elicited in incidental learning situations are of potential interest in many research fields, including language acquisition, object knowledge formation and motor learning. They have been the focus of studies on implicit learning for nearly 40 years. Stemming from a different research tradition, studies on statistical learning carried out in the past 10 years after the seminal studies by Saffran and collaborators, appear to be closely related, and the similarity between the two approaches is strengthened further by their recent evolution. However, implicit learning and statistical learning research favor different interpretations, focusing on the formation of chunks and statistical computations, respectively. We examine these differing approaches and suggest that this divergence opens up a major theoretical challenge for future studies.