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Lexical ambiguity is pervasive among Chinese characters as many of them are polysemantic, with one orthographic form carrying unrelated meanings, related meanings, or sometimes both unrelated and related meanings. A large-scale database with ambiguity measures for simplified Chinese characters has yet to be developed, which could greatly benefit psycholinguistic research on the Chinese language or cross-language comparisons. This article reports two sets of ratings by native speakers, the perceived number of meanings (pNoM) for 4,363 characters and the perceived relatedness of meanings (pRoM) for a subset of 1,053 characters. These rating-based ambiguity measures capture the representational nuance about a character's meanings stored in average native speakers' mental lexicon, which tends to be obscured by dictionary- and corpus-based ambiguity measures. Consequently, they each account for a reliable portion of variance in the efficiency of character processing, above and beyond the effects of character frequency, age of acquisition, and other types of ambiguity measures. Theoretical and empirical implications with regard to the plurality and the relatedness of character meanings, the two focal aspects of debate on lexical ambiguity, are discussed., Competing Interests: Declaration of conflicting interestsThe author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Regular polysemes are sets of ambiguous words that all share the same relationship between their meanings, such as CHICKEN and LOBSTER both referring to an animal or its meat. To probe how a distributional semantic model, here exemplified by bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT), represents regular polysemy, we analyzed whether its embeddings support answering sense analogy questions similar to "is the mapping between CHICKEN (as an animal) and CHICKEN (as a meat) similar to that which maps between LOBSTER (as an animal) to LOBSTER (as a meat)?" We did so using the LRcos model, which combines a logistic regression classifier of different categories (e.g., animal vs. meat) with a measure of cosine similarity. We found that (a) the model was sensitive to the shared structure within a given regular relationship; (b) the shared structure varies across different regular relationships (e.g., animal/meat vs. location/organization), potentially reflective of a "regularity continuum;" (c) some high-order latent structure is shared across different regular relationships, suggestive of a similar latent structure across different types of relationships; and (d) there is a lack of evidence for the aforementioned effects being explained by meaning overlap. Lastly, we found that both components of the LRcos model made important contributions to accurate responding and that a variation of this method could yield an accuracy boost of 10% in answering sense analogy questions. These findings enrich previous theoretical work on regular polysemy with a computationally explicit theory and methods, and provide evidence for an important organizational principle for the mental lexicon and the broader conceptual knowledge system., (© 2024 The Authors. Cognitive Science published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Cognitive Science Society (CSS).)

The Semantic Settling Dynamics model postulated that the seemingly inconsistent effects of lexical ambiguity are, in fact, a systematic manifestation of the specific dynamics that arise as a consequence of the amount of time spent in processing. The model has thus far been tested by prolonging lexical decision and comparing homonymous, polysemous, and unambiguous words in a factorial design. Here, we kept the strategy of task manipulation but tested the model by using continuous measures as indices of the level of lexical ambiguity and their slopes as indices of the effect size. We expressed the size of the polysemy effect as the slope of the effect of entropy of sense probability distribution and the size of the homonymy effect as the redundancy of sense probability distribution. Comparing lexical decision tasks with the shorter and longer time spent in processing, we observed the predicted decrease in the effect of the polysemy level as well as the predicted increase in the effect of homonymy level.

Lexical ambiguity-the phenomenon of a single word having multiple, distinguishable senses-is pervasive in language. Both the degree of ambiguity of a word (roughly, its number of senses) and the relatedness of those senses have been found to have widespread effects on language acquisition and processing. Recently, distributional approaches to semantics, in which a word's meaning is determined by its contexts, have led to successful research quantifying the degree of ambiguity, but these measures have not distinguished between the ambiguity of words with multiple related senses versus multiple unrelated meanings. In this work, we present the first assessment of whether distributional meaning representations can capture the ambiguity structure of a word, including both the number and relatedness of senses. On a very large sample of English words, we find that some, but not all, distributional semantic representations that we test exhibit detectable differences between sets of monosemes (unambiguous words; N = 964), polysemes (with multiple related senses; N = 4,096), and homonyms (with multiple unrelated senses; N = 355). Our findings begin to answer open questions from earlier work regarding whether distributional semantic representations of words, which successfully capture various semantic relationships, also reflect fine-grained aspects of meaning structure that influence human behavior. Our findings emphasize the importance of measuring whether proposed lexical representations capture such distinctions: In addition to standard benchmarks that test the similarity structure of distributional semantic models, we need to also consider whether they have cognitively plausible ambiguity structure., (© 2021 Cognitive Science Society.)

Most words in natural languages are polysemous; that is, they have related but different meanings in different contexts. This one-to-many mapping of form to meaning presents a challenge to understanding how word meanings are learned, represented, and processed. Previous work has focused on solutions in which multiple static semantic representations are linked to a single word form, which fails to capture important generalizations about how polysemous words are used; in particular, the graded nature of polysemous senses, and the flexibility and regularity of polysemy use. We provide a novel view of how polysemous words are represented and processed, focusing on how meaning is modulated by context. Our theory is implemented within a recurrent neural network that learns distributional information through exposure to a large and representative corpus of English. Clusters of meaning emerge from how the model processes individual word forms. In keeping with distributional theories of semantics, we suggest word meanings are generalized from contexts of different word tokens, with polysemy emerging as multiple clusters of contextually modulated meanings. We validate our results against a human-annotated corpus of polysemy focusing on the gradedness, flexibility, and regularity of polysemous sense individuation, as well as behavioral findings of offline sense relatedness ratings and online sentence processing. The results provide novel insights into how polysemy emerges from contextual processing of word meaning from both a theoretical and computational point of view., (© 2021 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.)

We report results from a self-paced silent-reading study and a self-paced reading-aloud study examining ambiguous forms (heteronyms) of Russian animate and inanimate nouns which are differentiated in speech through word stress, for example, uCHItelja.TEACHER.GEN/ACC.SG and uchiteLJA.TEACHERS.NOM.PL . 1 During reading, the absence of the auditory cue (word stress) to word identification results in morphologically ambiguous forms since both words have the same inflectional marking, -ja . Because word inflection is a reliable cue to syntactic role assignment, the ambiguity affects the level of morphology and of syntactic structure. However, word order constraints and frequency advantage of the GEN over both the NOM and the ACC noun forms with the - a/-ja inflection should pre-empt two different syntactic parses (OVS vs. SVO) when the heteronym is sentence-initial. We inquired into whether the parser is aware of the multi-level ambiguity and whether selected conflicting cues (case, word order, animacy) can prime parallel access to several structural parses. We found that animate and inanimate nouns patterned differently. The difference was consistent across the experiments. Against the backdrop of classical sentence processing dichotomies, the emergent pattern fits with the serial interactive or the parallel modular parser hypothesis.

Most words are ambiguous: Individual word forms (e.g., run ) can map onto multiple different interpretations depending on their sentence context (e.g., the athlete/politician/river runs ). Models of word-meaning access must therefore explain how listeners and readers can rapidly settle on a single, contextually appropriate meaning for each word that they encounter. I present a new account of word-meaning access that places semantic disambiguation at its core and integrates evidence from a wide variety of experimental approaches to explain this key aspect of language comprehension. The model has three key characteristics. (a) Lexical-semantic knowledge is viewed as a high-dimensional space; familiar word meanings correspond to stable states within this lexical-semantic space. (b) Multiple linguistic and paralinguistic cues can influence the settling process by which the system resolves on one of these familiar meanings. (c) Learning mechanisms play a vital role in facilitating rapid word-meaning access by shaping and maintaining high-quality lexical-semantic knowledge throughout the life span. In contrast to earlier models of word-meaning access, I highlight individual differences in lexical-semantic knowledge: Each person's lexicon is uniquely structured by specific, idiosyncratic linguistic experiences.

The present study explores the issue of why ambiguous words are recognized faster than unambiguous ones during word recognition. To this end we contrasted two different hypotheses: the semantic feedback hypothesis (Hino and Lupker in J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform 22:1331-1356, 1996. https://doi.org/10.1037/0096-1523.22.6.1331 ), and the hypothesis proposed by Borowsky and Masson (J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cognit 22:63-85, 1996. https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.22.1.63 ). Although both hypotheses agree that ambiguous words benefit during recognition in that they engage more semantic activation, they disagree as to whether or not this greater semantic activation feeds back to the orthographic level, hence speeding up the orthographic coding of ambiguous words. Participants were presented with ambiguous and unambiguous words in two tasks, a lexical decision task (LDT) and a two-alternative forced-choice task (2AFC). We found differences between ambiguous and unambiguous words in both the LDT and the 2AFC tasks. These results suggest that the orthographic coding of ambiguous words is boosted during word processing. This finding lends support to the semantic feedback hypothesis.

Sentences such as The bags are light allow both collective (they are light together) and distributive interpretations (each bag is light). We report the results of two experiments showing that this collective/distributive contrast gives rise to priming effects. These findings suggest that collective and distributive readings involve different interpretative mechanisms, which are at play during real comprehension and can be targeted by priming, independently of the specific verification strategy associated with each interpretation., (Copyright © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Recent evidence on the time-course of conversational perspective taking is mixed. Some results suggest that listeners rapidly incorporate an interlocutor's knowledge during comprehension, while other findings suggest that listeners initially interpret language egocentrically. A key finding in support of the egocentric view comes from visual-world eye-tracking studies - listeners systematically look at potential referents that are known to them but unknown to the speaker. An alternative explanation is that eye movements might be driven by attentional processes that are unrelated to referent identification. To address this question, we assessed the time-course of perspective taking using event-related potentials (ERP). Participants were instructed to select a referent from a display of four animals (e.g., "Click on the brontosaurus with the boots") by a speaker who could only see three of the animals. A competitor (e.g., a brontosaurus with a purse) was either mutually visible, visible only to the listener, or absent from the display. Results showed that only the mutually visible competitor elicited an ERP signature of referential ambiguity. Critically, ERPs exhibited no evidence of referential confusion when the listener had privileged access to the competitor. Contra the egocentric hypothesis, this pattern of results indicates that listeners did not consider privileged competitors to be candidates for reference. These findings are consistent with theories of language processing that allow socio-pragmatic information to rapidly influence online language comprehension. The results also suggest that eye-tracking evidence in studies of online reference resolution may include distraction effects driven by privileged competitors and highlight the importance of using multiple measures to investigate perspective use., (Copyright © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

It is not clear whether multiple unrelated meanings inhibit or facilitate word recognition. Some studies have found a disadvantage for words having multiple meanings with respect to unambiguous words in lexical decision tasks (LDT), whereas several others have shown a facilitation for such words. In the present study, we argue that these inconsistent findings may be due to the approach employed to select ambiguous words across studies. To address this issue, we conducted three LDT experiments in which we varied the measure used to classify ambiguous and unambiguous words. The results suggest that multiple unrelated meanings facilitate word recognition. In addition, we observed that the approach employed to select ambiguous words may affect the pattern of experimental results. This evidence has relevant implications for theoretical accounts of ambiguous words processing and representation.

Previous studies on Korean relative clauses (RC) show that, with respect to processing, object-extracted relative clauses (ORC) are more difficult to process at the head noun than subject-extracted relative clauses within temporarily ambiguous contexts. ORCs, however, are predicted by experience-based processing models to incur a greater processing cost during early processing stages at the RC verb, since it is a likely locus of disambiguation for RCs in Korean, and because ORCs are a less frequent structure. Consequently, the current study investigates whether processing difficulty for ORCs manifests itself at the RC verb using eye-tracking methods, a simple sentence structure and a sentential-decision task. The results revealed significantly increased go-past reading times for ORCs at the RC verb. We believe this is a result of a less frequent structure being more difficult to parse during disambiguation. Accordingly, experience-based models of processing can accurately predict difficulty for ORCs in Korean.

We use experimental data to shed light on the ongoing question of whether Korean allows inverse scope interpretation in sentences containing an indefinite subject and a universally quantified direct object (e.g., 'Someone bought each loaf of bread at the bakery'). The results of an off-line acceptability judgment task (n = 38) and an online self-paced reading task (n [Formula: see text] 22) indicate that inverse scope interpretations are in fact permitted in Korean as a secondary option, as is also the case in English. We argue that the dispreference for the inverse scope reading reflects processing considerations related to burden on working memory.

Presents a model of high-dimensional context space, the Hyperspace Analogue to Language (HAL), with a series of simulations modelling human empirical results. Proposes that HAL's context space can be used to provide a basic categorization of semantic and grammatical concepts; model certain aspects of morphological ambiguity in verbs; and provide an account of semantic context effects in syntactic processing. (77 references) (Author/CK)

Reviews some history of how lexical representations have acquired an important role in sentence processing research. Discusses relevant issues, including the importance of timecourse information in theorizing; the importance of frequency information in theories of sentence processing; and the question of the grain of frequency information. (42 references) (Author/CK)

Investigates the linguistic abilities of a subgroup of grammatical specific language impaired (SLI) children, focusing on the use of referential expressions in a narrative discourse and providing insight into the underlying nature of grammatical SLI. Findings support the hypothesized modular nature of grammatical SLI children's underlying linguistic deficit. (56 references) (Author/CK)

Explores the prediction of the referential theory, which maintains that the relative complexity of discourse representations plays a key role in determining the perceiver's immediate parsing preferences. Results indicate that semantic/referential principles are applied immediately in an online ambiguity resolution and preempt general world knowledge. (62 references) (Author/CK)

Notes that in phonetic categorization, listeners hear a range of speech sounds forming a continuum of ambiguous sounds between two endpoints and are required to identify the sounds as one or other of the endpoints. Points out that this task has been used in phonetics and in psycholinguistics to study categorical perception, selective adaptation, speaking rate normalization, and trading relations. (61 references) (Author/CK)

Conducted a series of experiments in German, Dutch, French, Italian, and English to show that four factors systematically interact when people interpret spatial expressions: the reference object being intrinsically oriented or not; the preposition that is used; the social characteristics of the discourse situation; and the prepositional inventory of the language at issue, as regards its spatial and temporal prepositions. (37 references) (Author/CK)

Examines research on the interpretation of ambiguous sentences and the presence or absence of contextual override effects. This study also examines the requirements placed on computational models of word-by-word incremental processing. The emerging picture is of a multiple constraint-based system in which knowledge ranging from lexical through pragmatic can influence the interpretation of incoming material. (13 references) (CK)

Describes two experiments on the processing of ambiguous words: one involving lexical decisions for words related to dominant or subordinate meanings of homograph primes, the other involving ambiguous words ending sentences that bias the homographs at varying degrees. Concludes that dominance and context contribute independently to processing of ambiguous words. (Author/MES)

Sheaves are mathematical objects that describe the globally compatible data associated with open sets of a topological space. Original examples of sheaves were continuous functions; later they also became powerful tools in algebraic geometry, as well as logic and set theory. More recently, sheaves have been applied to the theory of contextuality in quantum mechanics. Whenever the local data are not necessarily compatible, sheaves are replaced by the simpler setting of presheaves. In previous work, we used presheaves to model lexically ambiguous phrases in natural language and identified the order of their disambiguation. In the work presented here, we model syntactic ambiguities and study a phenomenon in human parsing called garden-pathing. It has been shown that the information-theoretic quantity known as 'surprisal' correlates with human reading times in natural language but fails to do so in garden-path sentences. We compute the degree of signalling in our presheaves using probabilities from the large language model BERT and evaluate predictions on two psycholinguistic datasets. Our degree of signalling outperforms surprisal in two ways: (i) it distinguishes between hard and easy garden-path sentences (with a p -value <10−5), whereas existing work could not, (ii) its garden-path effect is larger in one of the datasets (32 ms versus 8.75 ms per word), leading to better prediction accuracies. This article is part of the theme issue 'Quantum contextuality, causality and freedom of choice'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An experiment investigated the "good-enough" processing account regarding how people parse sentences with late-closure ambiguity, such as While Anna dressed the baby who was cute and cuddly spit up on the bed. One possible result of an initial misparse of the sentence (thinking that Anna dressed the baby) is that the correct parse then cannot be created. The alternative is that, although the misparse may linger in the comprehender's mind, the correct parse is eventually established and coexists with the misparse. This study approached this issue through an analogy to quantum physics. When photons are directed toward two small slits, it appears as if each photon passes through both slits ("bothness"). If particles not subject to quantum effects are directed at the slits, they pass through one or the other ("oneness"). Participants read sentences containing the late-closure ambiguity and afterward answered two questions about each sentence. These could query the potential misparse (Did Anna dress the baby?), correct-parse (Did Anna dress herself?), or the main clause (Did the baby spit up on the bed?), and the order of the question types was varied to test for quantum measurement context effects. The results supported "oneness," that is, the correct-parse and misparse of the subordinate clause do not coexist. Participants rarely said "yes" to both the misparse and correct-parse questions, and the "yes" response proportions for these two questions invariably added up to around 1.0. Furthermore, no quantum-like measurement-order effect between misparse and correct-parse questions was found. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For any research program examining how ambiguous words are processed in broader linguistic contexts, a first step is to establish factors relating to the frequency balance or dominance of those words' multiple meanings, as well as the similarity of those meanings to one other. Homonyms—words with divergent meanings—are one ambiguous word type commonly utilized in psycholinguistic research. In contrast, although polysemes—words with multiple related senses—are far more common in English, they have been less frequently used as tools for understanding one-to-many word-to-meaning mappings. The current paper details two norming studies of a relatively large number of ambiguous English words. In the first, offline dominance norming is detailed for 547 homonyms and polysemes via a free association task suitable for words across the ambiguity continuum, with a goal of identifying words with more equibiased meanings. The second norming assesses offline meaning similarity for a partial subset of 318 ambiguous words (including homonyms, unambiguous words, and polysemes divided into regular and irregular types) using a novel, continuous rating method reliant on the linguistic phenomenon of zeugma. In addition, we conduct computational analyses on the human similarity norming data using the BERT pretrained neural language model (Devlin et al., 2018, BERT: Pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding. ArXiv Preprint. arXiv:1810.04805) to evaluate factors that may explain variance beyond that accounted for by dictionary-criteria ambiguity categories. Finally, we make available the summarized item dominance values and similarity ratings in resultant appendices (see supplementary material), as well as individual item and participant norming data, which can be accessed online (https://osf.io/g7fmv/). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Translating experimental tasks that were designed to investigate differences between conditions at the group-level into valid and reliable instruments to measure individual differences in cognitive skills is challenging (Hedge et al., 2018; Rouder et al., 2019; Rouder & Haaf, 2019). For psycholinguists, the additional complexities associated with selecting or constructing language stimuli, and the need for appropriate well-matched baseline conditions make this endeavour particularly complex. In a typical experiment, a process-of-interest (e.g. ambiguity resolution) is targeted by contrasting performance in an experimental condition with performance in a wellmatched control condition. In many cases, careful between-condition matching precludes the same participant from encountering all stimulus items. Unfortunately, solutions that work for group-level research (e.g. constructing counterbalanced experiment versions) are inappropriate for individual-differences designs. As a case study, we report an ambiguity resolution experiment that illustrates the steps that researchers can take to address this issue and assess whether their measurement instrument is both valid and reliable. On the basis of our findings, we caution against the widespread approach of using datasets from group-level studies to also answer important questions about individual differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the creation of a normed lexicon of 150 pairs of English and Italian idioms annotated by translatability level (Beck, 2020). The dataset was created through the implementation of a cross-linguistic norming study conducted online via a novel combination of tools and design, which was validated by data reliability measurement. The lexicon contains information with respect to two groups of idiom variables (Hubers, Cucchiarini, Strik, & Dijkstra, 2019): Experience-Based Variables ("EBVs": familiarity, meaningfulness and objective knowledge) and Content-Based Variables ("CBVs": literal plausibility, decomposability and transparency). These variables are particularly relevant for the analysis of ambiguous contexts where there is an interaction between the literal and figurative meaning of an idiom (Wagner, 2021). In particular, the sum of the mean ratings obtained for the three CBVs provides the Potential Idiomatic Ambiguity ("PIA") index of each idiom: the higher the PIA, the more likely the idiom should be to occur in ambiguous contexts. This index can therefore be exploited in the setup of future psycholinguistic experiments to verify the relationship between the internal distribution of idiom features and ambiguous contexts. Moreover, the lexicon is a valuable research tool per se, since it contributes to bridging the gap in cross-linguistic research in idiom norming studies (Nordmann, Cleland, & Bull, 2014; Pastor, 2021), enabling systematic comparative analyses and enhancing understanding of the relationships among the examined variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One perennially important question for theories of sentence comprehension is whether the human sentence processing mechanism is parallel (i.e., it simultaneously represents multiple syntactic analyses of linguistic input) or serial (i.e., it constructs only a single analysis at a time). Despite its centrality, this question has proven difficult to address for both theoretical and methodological reasons (Gibson & Pearlmutter, 2000; Lewis, 2000). In the present study, we reassess this question from a novel perspective. We investigated the well-known ambiguity advantage effect (Traxler, Pickering, & Clifton, 1998) in a speeded acceptability judgment task. We adopted a signal detection theoretic approach to these data, with the goal of determining whether speeded judgment responses were conditioned on one or multiple syntactic analyses. To link these results to incremental parsing models, we developed formal models to quantitatively evaluate how serial and parallel parsing models should impact perceived sentence acceptability in our task. Our results suggest that speeded acceptability judgments are jointly conditioned on multiple parses of the input, a finding that is overall more consistent with parallel parsing models than serial models. Our study thus provides a new, psychophysical argument for coactive parses during language comprehension. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

This two-part paper bridges insights from psycholinguistics and from theoretical and computational lexicography to develop a fine-grained classification of polysemy organized along a wider spectrum of sense remoteness of ambiguous words in Polish based on the investigation of a large collection of linguistic data. In the second part, we show that polysemy is not a stable phenomenon and relations between senses may differ across language users. For instance, our fifty-fifty class or borderline cases may be represented differently by different language users depending on their perception of the world, world knowledge, associations. We point to some parameters of variation in the class of polysemy by metonymy and polysemy by metaphor which may affect their sense remoteness and consequently also the way they are represented in the mental lexicon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thematic-role assignment is influenced by several classes of cues during sentence comprehension, ranging from morphological exponents of syntactic relation such as case and agreement to probabilistic cues such as prosody. The effect of these cues cross-linguistically varies, presumably reflecting their language-specific robustness in signaling thematic roles. However, language-specific frequencies are not mapped onto the cue strength in a one-to-one fashion. The present article reports two eye-tracking studies on Hungarian examining the interaction of case and prosody during the processing of case-unambiguous (Experiment 1) and case-ambiguous (Experiment 2) clauses. Eye fixations reveal that case is a strong cue for thematic role assignment, but stress only enhances the effect of case in case-unambiguous clauses. This result differs from findings reported for Italian and German in which case initial stress reduces the expectation for subject-first clauses. Furthermore, the sentence comprehension facts are not explained by corpus frequencies in Hungarian. After considering an array of hypotheses about the roots of cross-linguistic variation, we conclude that the crucial difference lies in the high reliability/availability of case cues in Hungarian in contrast to the further languages examined within this experimental paradigm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In psycholinguistics and cognitive linguistics, mechanisms of processing ambiguous linguistic constructions have attracted great attention, since their understanding can tell us a lot about the fundamental processes of language comprehension — attaching concepts into single coherent representations. From the wide area of research on the topic of cognitive processing, this paper focuses on one type of ambiguity for which contradictory principles of processing have been established in different languages: the syntactic ambiguity of the relative clause, the most common and the most controversial sentence construction in research on language processing to date. The text offers an overview of empirical findings, hypotheses, and implications for wider models of cognitive processing, including their contradictions and methodological questions deserving further consideration. The concluding remarks sum up the findings, drawbacks and needed directions of future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout time, the study of typographical errors has been approached from a variety of fields, such as bibliography, textual criticism, publishing, metalexicography, psycholinguistics and natural language processing (NLP). However, typographical errors are inherent in written texts, and there is no multidisciplinary and allencompassing method for their treatment. For that reason, we present a theoretical review of typographical errors and their categorisation, especially from the perspective of psycholinguistics and NLP. On the one hand, some of the most thorough studies from the XX century onwards have been conducted in those two fields. On the other hand, there are remarkable similarities, regarding both the conclusions reached (e.g. the low frequency of errors in the first letter of words) and the limitations encountered (e.g. ambiguity in error categorisation). Thus, our starting point will be the theoretical distinction between motoric or execution errors (mistypings) and orthographic or cognitive errors (misspellings). Moreover, we will analyse the commonalities between the abovementioned disciplines when it comes to identifying the wrong operations (omission, insertion, substitution, and transposition) behind those phenomena. Finally, we will confirm that sometimes execution errors and competence errors cannot be distinguished in the practice of writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]