If we did stick with the idea of pronunciation, some of the examples from your list could be included if we allow regional accents, e.g. steel-still, peel-pill. However, those accents would also include many other sets not in the OP. barren-bearing particularly stands out, because I can't think of any accent that pushes those together audibly.

> I have noticed that a lot of people don't bother to consider the proper spelling of words but rather they just spell a word however it sounds to them.

This is my "spot the native English speaker" trick. Some native speakers consistently type "your" no matter if they mean "your" or "you're", and either "their" or "there" whenever they should have used one of "their", "there" or "they're".

My experience is that people who have learned English as a second language don't make this particular mistake as much - although we make tons of other mistakes, of course!

My guess is that the cause of this is that native speakers learn the language mostly by listening, long before they learn to read and write. Consequently, to them a word is primarily defined by its pronunciation. Its spelling is a secondary property that's attached years later.

For second language speakers, a word's spelling is usually something they're exposed to immediately when they learn the word - in many cases even before they learn how it's pronounced. To them, the spelling is what primarily defines a word.

It's a bit frustrating. I tend to get confused when "your" is used in place of "you're", and I usually have to reread the sentence once before I decipher the meaning.