Unexpectedly Poor Spelling in University Students

University students who were unexpectedly poor spellers relative to above average spellers revealed less extensive word-specific knowledge in their misspellings but not inferior knowledge of phoneme-grapheme correspondences, indicating that many of their orthographic representations lack word-specific graphemic information. Performance on deceptive nonwords in a printed lexical decision task showed that the poorer spellers did not place particular reliance on word beginnings as the basis for identification. However, because they could classify accurately many words for which they did not know the precise spelling, they may make greater use of partial cues when identifying words. They were also slower at making lexical decisions and slower and more error-prone at making same/different judgments on pairs of common words presented intact or with misordered letters. These effects showed that the poorer spellers were inferior at rapid orthographic analysis. The origin of their disadvantage in orthographic knowledge and orthographic-processing skill was not explained by more limited print exposure.