Spelling errors respect morphology: a corpus study of Hebrew orthography

Abstract

The paper aims to account for linguistic and processing factors responsible for the incidence of spelling errors in Hebrew. The theoretical goal is to disentangle a complex interaction between morphology, phonology, and orthography in production of written words. We focused on a specific spelling error in Hebrew: an overt representation of the word-internal segment/i/by the letter Y (י). This Y-insertion goes against the prescriptive spelling rules (cf. substandard MYRPST מירפסת vs conventional MRPST מרפסת,/miʁpeset/‘balcony’) and yet in our data it affects 25% of nouns with an appropriate phonological environment. Corpus analyses of unedited texts further revealed that errors proliferated in lower-frequency words, but their occurrence was much less likely if it would disrupt a morphological unit. These results point to morphology and statistical patterns of language use in Hebrew as major mechanisms driving orthographic learning: the paper discusses repercussions of our findings for theories of reading.