ABSTRACT
When psychologists and teachers talk about regularities and irregularities in written language, they are usually referring to rules for representing sounds by alphabetic letters. They call a written word “regular” if its spelling conforms to accepted letter-sound correspondences, and “irregular” if it does not. However, there are strong lexical and grammatical regularities in English spelling, and in the spelling of most other European languages as well. Words such as heal and health or muscle and muscular share a lexical root that is represented by the same spelling sequence, despite the fact that these sequences actually represent different sounds. The final phonemes in the three words waited, killed, and kissed are different in each case, but they are spelled in the same way in all three words for syntactic reasons: All three words are past verbs, and “-ed” is the conventional spelling for the past tense morpheme. Much the same point can be made about the opening phonemes in the words where and who. These are pronounced differently but spelled the same, and the common spelling reflects their common grammatical status: Both are interrogatives.
