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15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15)Barcelona, Spain |
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15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15)Barcelona, Spain |
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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.
Bibliographic reference. Huckvale, Mark / Shaw, Margaret (2003): "The intelligibility of a spelling-regular English accent", In ICPhS-15, 2509-2512.