The Nested Combinatorial Nature of English Spelling

Marie Foley and I are delighted to post this video on the nature of English spelling. We attempt to how it fits the "language universal of combinatoriality" highlighted in David Share's paper on the topic that was accepted by Reading Research Quarterly for publication in 2025. But is available as a pre-print in link below. We show how the matrix and word sum act as "combinatorial guard rails" to guide literacy instruction. These tools are central to Structured Word Inquiry (Bowers & Kirby, 2010) that we learned from Real Spelling (www.tbox2.com). I will add more to the description soon, but for now key references and links... Share, David. (2025). Blueprint for a Universal Theory of Learning to Read: The Combinatorial Model. Reading Research Quarterly. 60. 603. 10.1002/rrq.603. (Published after my video) Link here: https://www.researchgate.net/publicat... Christiansen, Morten & Chater, Nick. (2015). The Now-or-Never Bottleneck: A Fundamental Constraint on Language. The Behavioral and brain sciences. -1. 1-52. 10.1017/S0140525X1500031X. Link here: https://www.researchgate.net/publicat... Bowers, P.N. & Kirby, J.R. (2010) Effects of Morphological instruction on Vocabulary Acquisition, Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 23, 515–537. Link here: https://files.realspellers.org/PetesF... Kirby, J. R. & Bowers, P. N. (2017). Morphological instruction and literacy: Binding phonological, orthographic, and semantic features of words. In K. Cain, D. Compton, & R. Parrila, (Eds.), Theories of reading development. Amsterdam, NL: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Link here: https://www.researchgate.net/publicat...