Abstract

Predicting misspellings of rare words in a given orthography involves understanding that spelling errors are not random, but rather follow patterns related to the phoneme-grapheme structure of that orthography. The paper advances a new theoretical and experimental model of the encodability of Brazilian Portuguese that permits the estimation of the risk of spelling errors. It measures the degree of spelling difficulty for any given spoken word during auditory dictation tasks. The model uses Portuguese Phoneme-Grapheme Encoding Indexes derived from the analysis of 4.55M Phoneme-Grapheme Links. According to the encoding model, in the task of spelling spoken words under auditory dictation, the degree of spelling difficulty of any given word corresponds to the arithmetic mean of the Encoding Indexes of the Phoneme-Grapheme links involved. A study was conducted to assess whether the model could account for encoding precision. In the study, 154 students (61 from college and 93 from elementary school) spelled under dictation a corpus of 560 rare spoken words. The corpus comprised combinations of up to 280 Phoneme-Grapheme Links, and, to maximize phonological encoding, the 560 spoken words to be spelled under dictation had low orthographic familiarity. Each student was required to encode on average 3,676 Phoneme-Grapheme Link instances. Regression analysis revealed that word spelling precision increased with the degree of word encodability. Results suggest the encodability model predicts word-spelling precision in Brazilian Portuguese. 

Keywords

Portuguese, misspelling, encoding, phoneme, grapheme