What does Spelling tell us about Cognition?

Festschrift for Philip Smith

Uta FrithJuly 2008

Confessions of a Cognitive Psychologist

Saturday, 4 January 14

A Bit of Background1964

• Beetles have many No. 1 hits

• Rolling Stones first concerts with riots

• Goldfinger with Sean Connery

• Bombs on Vietnam

• Martin Luther King Nobel Peace Prize

• Harold Wilson wins Election

• Philip T Smith obtains BA at Cambridge Uta Frith comes to UK


A Leitmotiv

Sampler made by Anna Maria Magdalena Gödel aged 10 years

The Alphabet


More about the Alphabet

Phoenician Alphabet, ca. 1200 BC

Mapping graphemes and phonemes - principle of the alphabet


Spelling

South German ca. 1320

Lady Grammar


Grammatica

La Hyre ca.1630

Spelling and Language


Which hobbies are Frith’s? which are Smith’s?


Favourite Hobby?

Universal Phonetic Alphabet published inPhilosophical transactions 1686

“That ingenious and inquisitive personFrancis Lodwick”(John Wilkins, 1668)

English Spelling


Cognitive Processes in Spelling• Words are representations in the mind• they convey different types of information

• phonetic, semantic, graphemic• Semantic information influences extraction of graphemic information• BUT what are the detailed mechanisms?• Cognitively rich structures need to be unpacked before model of reading

and writing can be constructed

Philip Smith• 1965-6 visiting Researcher Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies• 1966-9 Junior Research Fellow at Queen’s College Oxford• 1970-71 Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer Stanford• 1972-80 Lecturer Stirling

Uta Frith• 1968 - MRC External Scientific Staff• 1980 Edits Cognitive Processes in Spelling


What Spellings can reveal

Knowledge about words you didn’t know you had

loot vs lute *Indian vs Old Provencalmail vs male *Germanic vs Latinapostrophe vs exquisite *Greek vs Latindynamite vs Miss Dynamite *old vs new language


More work by Smith on Spelling and Language

• The perceived origin of words as revealed in stress assignment

• Role of the final e - implicit knowledge

• e cancellation tasks

How many e’s in the following three lines?

music memory spring coriander sound joy merry party train pink happy hand northern hay function strong best tested biscuit strawberry often ebony money invest personal passport door airport security west


What the tasks can reveal

8? music memory spring coriander sound joy merry party train pink happy hand northern hay function strong best tested biscuit strawberry often ebony money invest personal passport door airport security west

15? coriander northern tested strawberry often money security

It is the linguistic function of es that cause us to miss the e or not.

We readily miss e in -ed and in unstressed syllable


Secret knowledge of the English Speller

• Some distinctions for stress placement in English

• tempest, edit vs. domain, surprise• cinema vs veranda• asterisk vs burlesque

• Secrets of the final -e

• freeze vs kibbutz• little vs axolotl• ice vs music, rage vs rag• please vs pleas


Poor spellers - good readers

• Some people can’t help representing spelling patterns - overriding phonology

• Other people are vague about graphemes and their order - they represent spelling patterns in partial form

• Most people when they spell are guided by sound

• Not so much when they read


Reading by Eye and Spelling by Ear

• Differences between reading and spelling found by Frith and by Smith

• Frith: phoneme by phoneme writing is essence of alphabetic principle• but reading undercuts alphabetic principle by orthographic patterns

• Smith: selection task: we prefer -e after v, avoid -e after g‘give’ not ‘giv’ and ‘rigg’ not ‘rigge’

• but in production task: we over-generalise on phonological basis (buffe)


What does Spelling tell us about Cognition?

Ready access to cultural knowledge

• Meaning• History• Phonology• Articulation• Motor plans

Representations of words is rich beyond dreams

Complex knowledge can be implicit


Language and History

Pretend Spelling Reform

Would you keep or drop the e in these words?love

keep *Old Germanmove

drop *Old French‘a surprising finding 900 years after the French invasion’

Would you keep or drop the last letter in these words?houses, dogs, hoped, shopped keep‘grammatical markers are valued in spelling’


Reading Strategies in different Orthographies

Spelling knowledge is shaped by cultureAre reading strategies shaped by culture?

What effect do culturally different reading strategieshave on behaviour?

Can strategies be made visible in the brain?


Comparing different writing systems

Differences in reading speed?reading words, non-words

Differences in neural activation patterns?brain activation during reading aloudand when merely exposed to print


300

350

400

450

500

550

Engl i shI ta l i an

words nonwords

nonwords

mse

c

Reaction Times for reading words and nonwords

**

*

* p <.001

English REDItalian GREEN

cabinmarketcottage

marmopontemoto

margopondamoco

caginmarnetconnage


The new frontierstarting in 1990s

PET Scan studyCompare skilled readerslooking at print and letterlike shapes

Subtract brain activation


Greater activation in English readers in‘word naming area’ The orthographic lexicon?


The question of Dyslexia

•The same neuro-cognitive basis•But different reading behaviourSame neuro-cognitive basis

but different behaviour


Cross-cultural differences in reading efficiency

Errors in reading


Reduced activation in dyslexia

dyslexicnormal


The bottom line

Orthographic lexicon can be made visible

In English readers this is more active

In dyslexics this system is a bottleneckand

shows reduced activation


No longer a frontier

• MRI studies on reading now flourish

• Dyslexia in different orthographies puts spotlight on Word Form Area of the Brain “BA37”

• Bottleneck in processing what words look like and what they sound like


More treasure to be found

• MRI studies of spelling are still to be done

• MRI studies of good readers who are poor spellers

• are they different from poor readers/poor spellers?


English spelling A thing of beauty

Laughter, women, science, psychology, Worcestershire, shipped, yacht...

• Words preserve historical information

• give clues to grammar and meaning

• We need more studies to carry on the early work of Philip Smith


A Toast to PhilipA Toast to the EPS


What does Spelling tell us about Cognition?

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