Functional Pronunciation Units in English Words

Two distinct factors limit the orthographic regularity of English words: (a) Most characters can correspond to several different sounds and (b) characters can either stand alone or be combined in various ways for pronunciation as a single phoneme. This study addresses the second of these issues thro...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition memory, and cognition, 1994-07, Vol.20 (4), p.977-991
Main Authors: Berndt, Rita Sloan, D'Autrechy, C. Lynne, Reggia, James A
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Biological and medical sciences
English language
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Human
Humans
Language
Orthography
Phonetics
Photic Stimulation
Production and perception of spoken language
Pronunciation
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Social research
Words (Phonetic Units)
Citations: Items that cite this one
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Description
Summary:Two distinct factors limit the orthographic regularity of English words: (a) Most characters can correspond to several different sounds and (b) characters can either stand alone or be combined in various ways for pronunciation as a single phoneme. This study addresses the second of these issues through the analysis of a large corpus of English words. Data are presented describing the frequency that each character (or character cluster) functioned in the corpus as a correspondent of a single phoneme rather than being combined with other characters (or decomposed). Examples are provided regarding potential applications of these data in the construction of stimulus materials for cognitive studies, in neuropsychological investigations of dyslexia, and in computational models of word naming.
ISSN:0278-7393
1939-1285
DOI:10.1037/0278-7393.20.4.977