A dissociation between orthographic awareness and spelling production

Abstract

In this study, two nonword spelling and two orthographic awareness experiments were used to examine people's production and awareness of sound-spelling relationships. The results of the nonword spelling experiments suggest that, in general, people use phoneme-grapheme sized relationships when spelling nonwords. Alternatively, the results of the orthographic awareness experiments suggest that, under some circumstances, people can use larger sized sound-spelling relationships when judging how frequently subsyllabic relationships occur. Together the results suggest that there is a dissociation between sound-spelling production and sound-spelling awareness tasks, and the size of the sound-spelling relationship,, that people use varies under different tasks and task conditions.