Categories of spelling difficulty in speakers of English as a first and second language

An earlier hypothesis claimed that native speakers of English have an internalized set of spelling principles giving them power to spell unfamiliar but regularly spelled words, while speakers of English as a second language tend to learn words as isolated items with unpredictable strings of graphemes. This study tests the hypothesis that both of these groups are relatively poor spellers of low frequency, high regularity words. Having operationally defined the concepts of frequency and regularity, a spelling test was administered to a sample of each of the two populations. The data clearly (p