Priming the rules of spelling

This paper reports three spelling experiments that examined the effect of lexical priming through intervening items. In the first and second experiments, a strong effect of word priming on nonword spelling was found, even when two intervening filler items separated primetarget pairs. In addition, the absolute size of the effect was similar when one intervening item separated primetarget pairs and when two intervening items separated primetarget pairs. A much larger effect was found when no intervening items were used, however. This effect did not appear to be related to filler type, as Experiment 1 used nonword fillers, and Experiment 2 used word fillers. The third experiment examined the same effect with two intervening filler items, but instead used nonwords as primes (and thus examined a subsyllabic repetition effect). A similar-sized effect as that of the first and second experiments was found. The most plausible explanation of these results, which is consistent with the interactive dual-route model of spelling, is that they reflect the priming of soundspelling rules that people use to spell nonwords.