Context sensitivity in the spelling of English vowels

Statistical analyses of English sound-to-spelling correspondences (Kessler & Treiman, 2001) show that vowel spellings become more predictable, in some cases, when the preceding and following consonants are taken into account. In four experiments, we asked whether adult spellers are sensitive to such associations. We found evidence for sensitivity to associations involving both preceding and following consonants when examining adults' spellings of vowels in nonwords (Experiments 1 and 2) and their substitution errors on vowels in real words (Experiment 3). The results show that phoneme-to-grapheme mapping is sensitive to a broader array of context than just rime context. Additional findings suggest that the context must be within the same syllable to be influential (Experiment 4). To the extent that rimes play a special role in spelling, this role may derive from the fact that associations between vowels and codas are more common in English than associations between vowels and onsets, not from spellers' greater sensitivity to within-rime associations.