Statistical learning of orthotactic constraints: Evidence from typing

Possible spoken and written sequences of a language are determined by phonotactic and orthotactic rules, respectively. Adult speakers can learn both simple new phonotactic rules (e.g., "/k/ is always an onset in a syllable") and more complex second-order rules (e.g., "/k/ is an onset only if the vowel is /æ/, but a coda if the vowel is /ɪ/"). However, the learning timeline for more complex rules is less consistent across populations and languages. In this article, we investigate the learning of parallel orthotactic rules in typing. We first show that adults quickly learn new first-order constraints in typing similar to those in speaking (Experiment 1). Next, we show that they also learn second-order rules, with a timeline similar to learning such phonotactic rules in speaking (Experiment 2). We further find that the second-order constraint is learned for the coda, but not the onset, suggesting that learning new rules of sequencing is carried out by a chaining-type mechanism. Finally, we show that while phonology clearly influences orthography, orthotactic learning cannot be reduced to phonotactic learning (Experiment 3). Collectively, these data support strong similarities between the statistical learning of orthotactic and phonotactic constraints, pointing to the domain generality of the incremental learning principles across different modalities of language production. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).