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I spoke too soon. On the second page, the article says she did study, but did so "phonetically" and thus didn't understand what she was studying.

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This reminds me of something: I saw a documentary about championship Scrabble players and a lot of them aren't English speakers or even Latin alphabet language speakers. They treat Scrabble as a visual pattern game rather than a verbal one.

Pretty much been my experience playing. It's more about memorizing lists of words without really bothering to know what they mean and figuring out which words to use when and how to place them to maximize your point total on each play.

Family scrabble rules: if you don't know a definition for a word (which can be found in the dictionary if challenged) you can't use the word.

I mean no offense by this but.. is English your mother tongue?

I used to play Scrabble a ton and adopted a more verbal, etymological style that, I'd assumed, would be more common amongst native English speakers (but maybe not!)

It is, but my primary strategy has been to commit a huge list of words to memory, especially the two-letter words to join new words together for point efficiency.

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