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The intelligibility of a spelling-regular English accent

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. Green open access

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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.

Type: Proceedings paper
Title: The intelligibility of a spelling-regular English accent
Event: 15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15)
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
Publisher version: https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/i...
Language: English
Additional information: This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions.
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences > Speech, Hearing and Phonetic Sciences
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/74322
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