In English, the letters in a word’s spelling are sometimes associated with its part of speech or morphological structure. For example, final /ɨk/ and /ɨs/ are almost always spelled as ‹ic› and ‹ous›, respectively, when they are adjectival suffixes (e.g., basic, callous). In words that are not adjectives, these endings are likely to be spelled in other ways (e.g., gimmick, callus). These associations are rarely taught explicitly, but have adults internalized them using their implicit statistical learning skills? We studied this issue by having adults write sentences in which nonwords with final /ɨk/ and /ɨs/ served as either adjectives or nouns. Participants used spellings with final ‹ic› and ‹ous› more often when the nonwords appeared in adjective contexts than in noun contexts. This effect was stronger in participants who performed better on a standardized test of spelling ability than in participants who scored less well. However, the difference between the two contexts was substantially smaller than expected based on the statistics of the English writing system. The results point to the limits of statistical learning for certain potentially helpful morphological patterns. People may need explicit instruction in order to benefit fully from the regularities that English spelling offers.

在英语中，单词拼写中的字母有时与其词性或词法结构有关。例如，最终/ɨk/和/ɨs/几乎总是拼写为<IC>和<OU中>分别当它们形容词后缀（例如，BAS IC，调用的OU）。用非形容词的单词来说，这些结尾可能用其他方式拼写（例如gimm ick，请致电我们）。这些关联很少被明确地教授，但是成年人是否使用他们的隐式统计学习技能将它们内部化了？我们通过让成年人写句子来研究这个问题，在句子中以/ɨk/和/ɨs/结尾的非单词用作形容词或名词。当非单词出现在形容词上下文中时，与名词上下文中相比，参与者更经常使用带有最终‹ic›和‹ous›的拼写。在拼写能力的标准化测试中表现较好的参与者比得分较低的参与者的效果更强。但是，两种情况之间的差异远小于根据英语写作系统的统计数据所预期的差异。结果指出了对于某些潜在有用的形态学模式的统计学习的局限性。