34.3168, Support: Psycholinguistics: PhD, Nottingham Trent University

Wed Oct 25 00:05:05 UTC 2023

LINGUIST List: Vol-34-3168. Wed Oct 25 2023. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 34.3168, Support: Psycholinguistics: PhD, Nottingham Trent University

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Date: 21-Oct-2023
From: Mark Torrance [mark.torrance at ntu.ac.uk]
Subject: Psycholinguistics: PhD, Nottingham Trent University

Institution/Organization: Nottingham Trent University, UK
Department: Psychology / Language, Literacy and Psycholinguistics
Research Group
Web Address: https://www.ntu.ac.uk/research/groups-and-centres/groups/
language-literacy-and-psycholinguistics

Level: PhD

Specialty Areas: Psycholinguistics

Description:

COMPETITION FUNDED PHD STUDENTSHIP: SPELLING FLUENCY IN REGULAR AND
IRREGULAR ORTHOGRAPHIES

The successful applicant will receive funding for fees and a bursary
to cover living expenses.

Text production, for most adults, is remarkably fluent. Being able to
produce words and sentences on the page or screen without hesitation
is important not just because this means that text is produced more
rapidly, but also because hesitating to grapple with language –
particularly spelling – can mean that you forget what you were
intending to say.

Current theory suggests that text production results semi-parallel
process that cascade from ideation to finger movement. In developed
writers lower-level processing occurs without recourse to central
process (is ""automatic""). Developing spelling automaticity is, or
should be, a central aim of early-primary literacy education.

This project will explore how spelling fluency is achieved. There is a
small existing literature in this area, including work at NTU and
University of Stavanger. The project will contribute to understanding
of different routes to spelling retrieval, how these compete or
complement each other, and how this interaction plays out in the
period between first intending to write a word and completing its
output on the page. For example, must a complete orthographic
representation of the target word be available before participants
start writing, or is this retrieved piecemeal as the word is written?

We anticipate an initial series of experiments with adult writers
(e.g., picture-word interference tasks) conducted online and providing
robust test of existing theory, with the aim of developing
understanding of what happens in mature single-word spelling (i.e.
establishing what processes children must develop).

The project will then focus on children in early-primary grades
performing written picture naming and / or spelling-to-dictation tasks
with their handwriting captured digitally in real time. We anticipate
a series of experiments starting with the aim of establishing some
ways in which children’s processing of spelling differs from adult
processing at different ages, and then exploring ways of intervening
to move processing closer to the mature form. This will lay the
groundwork for developing theory-informed approaches to building
children's spelling fluency.

The proposed project is a collaboration between NTU and the Norwegian
Centre for Reading Education and Research
(https://www.uis.no/en/norwegian_reading_centre). Data collection will
be in both Norwegian and English, with travel to University of
Stavanger necessary for collection of Norwegian child data. Comparison
between English - a deep orthography with many words that cannot be
spelled phonetically - and Norwegian – a largely regular orthography -
will be central to testing the relative roles of orthographic and
phonological representations and processing when retrieving spelling.

Web Address for Applications: https://www.findaphd.com/phds/project/sp
elling-fluency-in-regular-and-irregular-orthographies/?p161964
Email Address for Applications: mark.torrance at ntu.ac.uk

Contact Information:
Please email mark.torrance at ntu.ac.uk in the first instance.

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