ERROR-RELATED NEGATIVITIES DURING SPELLING JUDGMENTS EXPOSE ORTHOGRAPHIC KNOWLEDGE

Understanding the role of phonological awareness in reading has been the focus of much psycholinguistic research, but less attention has been paid to understanding knowledge of the spellings that activate phonology. We carried out two experiments using ERPs to expose linguistic processes related to orthographic knowledge during judgments about the spellings of English words. In the first experiment, we confirmed that the error-related negativity (ERN) can be elicited during spelling decisions, and that its magnitude was correlated with behavioral measures of spelling knowledge. In the second experiment, we manipulated the phonology of misspelled stimuli and observed that ERN magnitudes were larger when misspelled words altered the phonology of their correctly spelled counterparts than when they preserved it. This finding has implications for the influence of internal phonological and orthographic representations on error monitoring during reading. In both experiments, ERN effect sizes were correlated with performance on a number of reading-related assessments, including offline spelling ability and vocabulary knowledge, affirming the interdependent nature of reading processes and suggesting the usefulness of ERNs for indexing knowledge of a wide range of reading-related skills.