"Diepe" Spelling en Het Leesproces, Speculaties en Data

Dutch orthography has traditionally been described as a morphophonemic writing system, a set of morpheme preserving regularities superimposed on a predominantly phonemic substratum.Causes for complicating a strictly regular one-to-one phoneme-letter relationship in Dutch are isolated, and discussed in terms of the diffic-ulties they pose to children learning to write. Recent and older frequency counts of spelling errors substantiate the widespread view that deviations from a 1 - 1 phoneme-letter correspondence are highly conducive to error.However, on the basis of (psycho)linguistic considerations, morpheme preserving regularities have been claimed to exert facilitating effects in the reading process.A series of experiments is proposed to determine to what extent morpho-logically motivated deviations from a 1 - 1 phoneme-letter correspondence, as well as more arbitrary disturbances of these correspondences, contribute to visual word recognition and reading. Some recent results of analogous experiments on foreign orthographies are mentioned, and discussed with respect to their implications for Dutch orthography.