How a study of the grapheme-phoneme relations in English disyllabic words challenges theories of print-to-sound conversion derived from the properties of monosyllabic words

Theories of print-to-sound conversion developed around computational models have generally left polysyllabic words out of their explanation because of the difficulties to represent them in the system. As a result, even though they have been specificied in full detail and shown to produce patterns of performance similar to those of skilled readers with monosyllabic words, none of them can actually be considered as complete. Here, I introduce a linguistic description of the grapheme-phoneme relations (i.e., orthographic units mapped onto a single speech sound) in disyllabic English words and discuss the way this description challenges some of the hypotheses derived from the properties of monosyllabic words. In particular, I will comment upon the preponderance of the information about stress placement for correct pronunciation assignment, the difficulty to appropriately segment the string into graphemes when disyllabic words are introduced (e.g., AI in WAIVE vs NAIVE), the contribution of a knowledge of the neighbouring letters for correct translation (e.g., C in CELL vs CALL), and the importance of the consideration of the phonetic properties of the adjacent letters for appropriate generalisation of the regularities (e.g., SS is pronounced as SH before a yod, in MISSION, PRESSURE, or MISS YOU pronounced in rapid order).
 

Home : News : Jamboree : 2003