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Одни ошибки вреднее других: роль типа и частотности орфографических ошибок в обработке слов
In the modern world of social media, we constantly read texts that were not subject to professional proof-reading
and editing. As a result, we see misspelled words more often than the previous generations. The effects are interesting
for several scientific disciplines, including psycholinguistics. Several experiments on different languages have recently demonstrated that the incidence of orthographic errors for a particular word reduces the quality of its lexical
representation in the mental lexicon. As a result, it is more difficult to judge whether the word is spelled correctly,
and — more surprisingly — it takes more time to read the word even when there are no errors.
In the present study, our goal was to find out whether the type of orthographic errors (the orthogram) plays a role
in addition to their incidence. We selected six orthograms forming two groups: more and less difficult ones. Two
experiments were conducted. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to judge whether stimulus words are spelled
correctly. In Experiment 2, all stimulus words were presented in the correct spelling in a lexical decision task, i.e. we
measured how fast they are processed. In Experiment 1, the type of the orthogram played a significant role, being
more important than any other factor. In Experiment 2, the influence of this factor could be reduced to the incidence
of incorrect spellings.
In other words, when we consciously decide how to spell, the type of orthogram plays a crucial role. As a result,
some errors are more frequent than others (although it is obvious that the incidence of errors can be only partially
predicted by the type of orthogram). However, when we simply read words, only the incidence of errors matters, i.e.
the type of orthogram affects the reading speed only indirectly.
Keywords: mental lexicon, orthographic errors, word proces