In this study, we investigated the source of the orthographic texture effect during familiar word spelling. Orthographic texture refers to the differential strength that individual letters in a word may be activated for output. Prior work indicates that strongly activated letters are more accurately produced than weakly activated ones (Jones, Folk, & Rapp, 2009, All Letters are not Equal: Sub-Graphemic Texture in Orthographic Working Memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 35, 1389-1402. DOI: 10.1037/a0017042). According to an orthographic lexical strength account, differences in activation of individual letters within words are the result of learning; more easily learned letters are more strongly represented and, thus, activated for output. However, an online-competition hypothesis indicates that the contribution of sublexical assembly processes during familiar word spelling may account for the effect. Current results support the orthographic lexical strength account; the lexical orthographic representations used for spelling are themselves textured.
Keywords: Spelling; orthographic representations; orthographic texture; phoneme-grapheme probability.