This document aims at pointing out a pattern of Italian spelling errors that are made by Italian mother tongue speakers. The purpose is to draw up a typology of spelling errors which will allow the corruption of a list of well-formed words using the ASCC package (see TEMAA deliverable 10).
The underlying idea is to use the taxonomy described here to create a test-suite of nonwords that are nonetheless likely to be typed by Italian speakers.
We have based our typology on publications related to language errors in Italian; however, most of the literature reports on grammar errors, lexical choice errors, or bad style rather than spelling errors proper. This is probably not due to the fact that Italians are sheltered from the problem, but rather it might be due to the fact that the language is strongly phonetic, and most people with a standard education would be unlikely to make spelling errors.