ABSTRACT
One would expect that psycholinguistics, as the study of the psychological processing of linguistic structures, is a natural home for the study of spelling. Instead, spelling has been rather neglected within mainstream psycholinguistics. The surge of research in spelling since the 1980s, to be sure, was important in correcting this neglect, even if this research was only implicitly psycholinguistic (Ehri, 1980; Frith, 1985; Henderson, 1981). Moreover, Treiman’s (1993) work on spelling development shows an explicitly psycholinguistic approach: It links the acquisition of spelling to linguistic structures by specific hypotheses about linguistic units. Nevertheless, it is fair to say that there has been a relative neglect of the psycholinguistic components of spelling. One finds little coverage of the topic in textbooks on psycholinguistics. More telling is the Handbook of Psycholinguistics (Gernsbacher, 1994), which covers the basic topics of the field in 34 chapters, none of which include spelling. Indeed, the reader searches in vain for an entry in the index under spelling.
