Huckvale, M;
Shaw, M;
(2003)
The intelligibility of a spelling-regular English accent.
In:
Proceedings of the 15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15).
(pp. 2509 - 2512).
IPA: Barcelona, Spain.
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Abstract
Regular English Pronunciation (REP) is an artificial accent of English designed to be more logically related to English spelling than modern naturally-occurring English accents. The REP pronunciation of words can be generated automatically with a set of just 200 rules and exceptions. These rules and exceptions have been measured to provide over 75% of standard pronunciations in running spoken English. This paper shows that the while the intelligibility of REP is a little worse than standard pronunciation on a challenging intelligibility task, it is significantly easier to comprehend than a matched control condition in which pronunciation changes are unrelated to spelling. The paper also shows that listeners improve in their ability to recognise REP over a short period of exposure. The results suggest that advocacy of regularised pronunciation has a role to play in the reform of English spelling.
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