The impact of analogical effects and social factors on the spelling of partially homophonous verb forms in informal social media writing

Abstract

The present study examines unintentional spelling errors on past participles produced by Flemish teenagers in private online writing. Previous psycholinguistic research on verb spelling errors in Dutch mainly focused on identical homophones (Bosman 2005; Frisson & Sandra 2002; Sandra et al. 1999). The present study, however, deals with past participles that are only partially homophonous with other forms in the inflectional paradigm and investigates whether the spelling of these verbs is affected by whole-word frequency, paradigmatic and bigram support for the correct spelling and the token frequency of the past participles’ morphological family. The error rates reflect the effect of both paradigmatic and bigram support. Moreover, the unique database makes it possible to analyze the impact of three social factors (Gender, Educational track and Age). Our results reveal an effect on the error rates of all social variables. Finally, these social factors do not interact with paradigmatic and bigram support.