Adolescents and Verb Spelling: The Impact of Gender and Educational Track on Rule Knowledge and Linguistic Attitudes

Abstract

The present paper examines the correlation between adolescents’ gender and educational profile on the one hand and their knowledge of the Dutch verb spelling rules and spelling attitudes on the other hand. A two-part survey was conducted among 451 Flemish students from different educational tracks. We conducted this survey in order to complement our previous research in which we observed social patterns in adolescents’ verb spelling errors on social media (Surkyn et al., 2019, 2020, 2021). Our results reveal that girls and theoretically oriented students care most about correct verb spelling. Moreover, theoretically oriented students have a better knowledge of the verb spelling rules. This survey provides additional evidence for the interpretation of the social patterns in our corpus research on Dutch verb spelling errors.