Spelling-sound regularity

[Benjamin Munson]

Dear Info-Childes Members:

Thanks for your very, very useful (and prompt) responses to my query about
the regularity of sound-spelling correspondence.

Below, please find the summary of the responses that were sent to me
privately.  I have not replicated the responses that were sent to the
entire list.  It looks like Jay McClelland will be helping me to calculate
a course-grained measure of spelling-sound correspondence.  With his
permission, I will share whatever we come up with.

Again, thanks for your responses.  They were most useful.

Brian MacWhinney wrote:

I don't think one could even begin to compute such an index without making
some simplifying assumptions. What one can do is compute the number of near
neighbors for a given word. Usually this is done for the words in a
particular experiment. I agree that computing this for all words would be
of some value. I think the CELEX folks might have done something like this.

Ngoni Chipere wrote:

A researcher in England did create a measure of sound-spelling
correspondences along the lines you describe, but I can't seem to remember
his name. His articles were published in education journals (he used the
measure to predict which words had a greater probability of being misspelt
by school children), so maybe the ERIC database would be a better place to
look. I'll look up my mailbox when I get to the office next week, as I
corresponded once with him, and I may be able find his name & email address.

Jay McClelland wrote:

The frequency-consistency equation discussed on pp. 72ff of Plaut,
McClelland, Seidenberg, and Patterson (1996)
http://www.cnbc.cmu.edu/~jlm/papers/PlautMcCSeidenbergPatterson96.pdf
May be of some use to you. You would first need to encode items and their
pronunciations according to the input and output representations used in
Plaut et al (Table 2, p 66). You could then calculate, for each phoneme j
in the correct pronunciation of test word t, the value of s_j^t, based on
equation 12. These s_j^t values could then be averaged to give an average
value for each word, I suppose, our combined in some other way. Also, it
might be useful to take into account the strength of activation of phonemes
not in the pronunciation of the word. I'd be happy to work with you to
compare the adequacy of variants of this measure and/or to help with some
of the calculations.

Alan Cruttenden wrote:

Try E.Carney, A Survey of English Spelling London~: Routledge 1994. Some of
the information there is included in my own book: A.Cruttenden, Gimson's
Pronunciation of English. Sixth edition London: Hodder

Yours,
Benjamin Munson



Benjamin Munson, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor

Department of Communication Disorders
University of Minnesota
115 Shevlin Hall
164 Pillsbury Drive, S.E.
Minneapolis, MN  55455

Department:     612-624-3322
Office:         612-624-0304
Fax:            612-624-7586
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