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Variability and invariance in learning alphabetic orthographies From linguistic description to psycholinguistic processing*

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Liliane Sprenger-Charolles and Danielle Béchennec CNRS & Université René Descartes, Paris

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When beginning to learn to read or to spell, children relying on the spoken language they already know, would have to learn only a limited set of correspondences between orthographic and phonological units instead of memorizing an unlimited number of sight words. Thus, whatever the language, phonological processing might be the core of reading and spelling acquisition. However, this acquisition may also depend on specific characteristics of each language. Particularly, the weight of the phonological processing may depend on the degree to which a written system represents the spoken language it encodes. To assess these hypotheses, after a presentation of the main linguistic specificities of four alphabetic written languages (English, French, German and Spanish), we reviewed the psycholinguistic literature. The studies in which were examined reading and spelling skills of young Spanish, German, and French children indicate a strong and early reliance on phonological processing, both in reading and in spelling. They also suggest that the orthographic lexicon is progressively set-up in reading and - but to a lesser extent - in spelling. It is also clearly shown that it is less difficult to learn to read and spell in shallow orthographies than in deeper ones, i.e. in Spanish, German and French compared to English, or in Spanish compared to French. Finally, the phonological reading processing units seem to depend on the phonological structure of each language. A tentative explanation of these results is given. When beginning to learn to read or to spell, children already more ore less master spoken language. If relying on what they know, they have to learn only a limited set of correspondences between orthographic and phonological units instead of memorizing an unlimited number of sight words. Phonological

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Written Language & Literacy 7:1 (2004), 9–33. issn 1387–6732 / e-issn 1570–6001© John Benjamins Publishing Company

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Liliane Sprenger-Charolles and Danielle Béchennec

processing thus could be the core of reading and spelling acquisition whatever the language. The aim of the present paper is to provide a survey of word reading and spelling development in alphabetic orthographies. We assumed that the processes beginning readers rely on depend on a general principle, common to all languages, but also to specific characteristics of each language. Particularly, we hypothesized that the weight of the phonological processing depends on the degree to which a writing system represents the spoken language it encodes. To assess this hypothesis, after a presentation of the main linguistic specificities of four alphabetic written languages (English, French, German and Spanish), we reviewed the psycholinguistic literature.

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Linguistic description

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First alphabets were probably closer than the modern ones to what the International Phonetic Alphabet has realized: a phoneme for a letter, a letter for a phoneme1. In modern languages the number of existing phonemes and of the letters that can be used to encode them is not the same. For instance, the roman alphabet provides 5 letters for vowels, sufficient for the 5 Spanish simple vowels, but not for the more than 14 simple vowels in spoken English, French and German. It has thus been necessary to use a combination of letters (ou for /u/ versus u for /y/ in French) or a letter with a diacritic marker (ü for /y/ versus u for /u/ in German) to transcribe the vowels, as well as to transcribe some consonantal phonemes, such as /w/ or /θ/. The graphic unit that corresponds to a phoneme is thus no more the letter but the grapheme, probably resulting in difficulties for beginning readers and spellers. Most of the differences between the phonological and the orthographic structure of the English, French, German and Spanish languages are related to the vowels, not to the consonants (Delattre, 1965; see also for English, Taylor & Serniclaes, 1998 and for German, Taylor & Serniclaes, 1999). For the latter (see Table in Appendix), the differences between the number of phonemes and the number of graphemes are almost the same in English, French and German (20–24 to 50–60), Spanish being characterized by the smallest difference (20–23 to 33). Similar inconsistencies (more than one pronunciation for one grapheme, or more than one spelling for one phoneme) are found in the four languages, some of them being context dependent. For example, according to the following vowel, the letter c may be /k/ or not in Spanish (cerca /θ…k/), in German (circa /ts…k/), in French (cercle /s…k/) and in English (circle /s…k/);

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Variability and invariance in learning alphabetic orthographies

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the letter g may be /g/ or /Š/ in German, French and English (garage) and /g/ (garaje) or /χ / (gente /’χente/) in Spanish. In German, at the end of the words or of the morphemes, written voiced consonants are pronounced voiceless (ab /p/, Feld /t/, Tag /k/). Other inconsistencies are unpredictable (in Spanish and in French, gu corresponds to /g/ as in guerra or aiguiser and to /g/ + /w/ or /C/ as in guardia or aiguille). Another reading and spelling difficulty is due to the fact that many written consonants may be silent, specially in English and French. In English for example, at the beginning of a word, kn, ps and wr become /n/, /s/, /r/ as in ‘know’, ‘psychology’ and ‘write’; the grapheme gh is silent before t as in ‘fight’, and at the end of a word as in ‘high’. As well, /t/ and /k/ disappear between /f/ or /s/ and /n/ or /l/ as in ‘soften’, ‘castle’ and ‘muscle’. Moreover, the L and R are not clearly articulated in postvocalic position, this phenomenon being stronger for the R that only lengthens the preceding monophthong in ‘barn’, ‘bird’, ‘board’, etc. When the preceding vowel is a diphthong, a weak R appears as in ‘bare’ or ‘bear’ /be6r/. In French, the silent consonants are mainly morphological markers located at the end of the word, such as the plural for nouns and verbs (ilS mangeNT… /il/m"Š /). However, they are often pronounced with the following word when it begins by a vowel (ilS arriveNT à… /ilzariv6ta/). In Spanish, a written consonant can also be silent at the end of a word, particularly in language spoken in Southern Spain. Another specificity of English and French written consonants, which penalizes mostly word spelling, is that they can be geminated without clear phonological properties, except in some cases. For example, in French and in English, ss corresponds to /s/, whereas the intervocalic s corresponds to /z/; in French, a double consonant modifies the pronunciation of a preceding e (dette /d7t/ versus petit /p6ti/). Therefore, for consonants, English grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPC) and phoneme-grapheme correspondences (PGC) are deeper than in French or German and, to a greater extent, than in Spanish. However the differences between the four languages do not seem to be very significant. On the other hand, compared to Spanish, and to a lesser extent to German and French, the reading and spelling of vowels in English raises a major problem. In Spanish, the 5 monophthongs are easily represented by the letters i, u, e, o and a. In German, the 14 monophthongs are grouped into pairs (/"/a/, /e/7/, /i/I/, /o/O/, y/Y/, /u/U/, /ø/œ /), mainly differentiated by an umlaut (i.e. ü versus u…) but allographs are also found (ö and eu for /ø/, ä and e for /7/, and ü and y for /y/). Vocalic lengthening is usually achieved by doubling the vowel or by adding a silent h or a silent e after the vowel (Bohne, Biene) while a vowel

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followed by a double consonant is short (offen). This system is simpler for reading than for spelling because long vowels can be spelled in more than one way. The spelling of French vowels is characterized by a high number of digraphs and by the presence of allographs (o also spelled au, eau and in /7/ also spelled im, en, ein, ain, aim…). But with the exceptions of e (which can be /e/7/, /6/ or /a/), and of en (which can be /"/ or /7/), the French vocalic graphemes mainly refer to the same phonemes (Catach, 1986; Véronis, 1986). Thus, GPC are highly predictable, whereas PGC are more difficult to manipulate because it is often necessary to choose between alternative spellings for a particular vocalic phoneme. The English monophthongs are difficult to explain without taking into account the following consonants, the number of syllables and the word stress (Deschamps, 1994). In monosyllabic words, short vowels GPC exhibit few exceptions. However, to read them correctly, it must be noted that they cannot be found at the end of a word, that they are followed by a nonsilent consonant, and that the postvocalic r modifies some of the preceding vowels. Long vowel spelling is complex. For example, 11 graphemes correspond to /i:/ (thEme, machIne, sEE, sEA, cAEsarean, concEIve, nIEce, kEY, quAY, pEOple and subpOEna). English is also clearly distinguished from the three other languages by the presence of the schwa /6/. This neutral vowel is found in German and French, but is almost always written e. In English the majority of unstressed vowels turn out to be a schwa and, according to Delattre (1965), over 50% of the vowels in connected speech can be neutralized. Therefore, when reading English words, you would be right half the time if you use a schwa instead of the specific vocalic graphemes. Yet, to spell the same words correctly, it is necessary to learn and memorize the conventional grapheme. The diphthongs do not exist in French, and raise problems only in English which shares with German and Spanish three main diphthongs, /ai/, /au/ and /oi/; /ei/ being specific to Spanish (Delattre, 1965). The Spanish spelling of these diphthongs has few exceptions, except that i can be spelled y at the end of a word (bailar/fray, boina/doy, beige/ley). In German, alternative spellings are found for /ai/ (LAIb, AmEIse) and /oi/ (erlÄUtern, hEUte). The spelling of English diphthongs is highly unpredictable. They can be represented by a single letter grapheme or by a digraph (for example, for /ai/, fIne, trY, fIRe, lIGHt, bUY and AISle…). Moreover, all English vowels are more or less articulated in a constant movement. This phenomenon is not easy to represent graphically. According to Delattre’s analysis (1965), the closest transcription of the English ‘do’ is [ddd6UUUuuuuw]. Compared to German and French, English GPC and PGC for vowels are thus deeper, Spanish being characterized by an almost one-to-one perfect mapping.

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These descriptive data are partially congruent with those of Ziegler, Jacobs and Stone (1996; see also Ziegler, 1999 and Ziegler, Stone & Jacob, 1997). The authors have compared the degree of bi-directional consistency 2 of orthography-to-phonology in monosyllabic words in English, French and German, not in Spanish. Inconsistency was defined at the orthographic and phonological rime levels. As regards orthography-to-phonology (O-P) rime consistency, a word was considered inconsistent when its orthographic rime can be read in more than one way (as -emme in femme /fam/ and flemme /fl7m/). As regards phonology-to-orthography (P-O) rime consistency, a word was considered inconsistent when its phonological rime can be written in more than one way (as /o/ in sot, seau, saut…). The degree of O-P inconsistency is higher in English (12.9%) than in German and French (5.8 and 4.9%). The degree of rime inconsistency is higher for P-O than for O-P in all three languages, and much higher in French (50.3%) than in English (28%) and German (25.9%). The differences between English and the two other languages are fewer than those expected according to our linguistic description based on grapheme-phoneme and phoneme-grapheme correspondences (GPC and PGC, see also Table in Appendix) and to the fact that the 40 English phonemes can be spelled by 1120 graphemes (Coulmas, 1996) whereas the 35 French phonemes can be spelled by 130 graphemes (Catach, 1986), the 40 German phonemes by 85 graphemes (Valtin, 1989) and the 29–32 Spanish phonemes by 45 graphemes. The differences between observed rime level and expected phoneme level based results may be due to a strong decrease in inconsistencies when taking into account rimes in monosyllabic words, particularly for English vowels. De facto, at the grapheme-phoneme level, the vowel consistency ratio for GPC appears very low in English and very high in French (48% vs. 94%, Peereman & Content, 1998) whereas for PGC it is similar in both languages (67% in English and 68% in French). However, only monosyllabic words were included in the Ziegler et al.’ s and Peereman et al.’ s databases and, at least in French, monosyllabic words represent only a small percentage (6.70%, that is 2396 of the 36,000 words in the Micro Robert, 1986, according to Content, Mousty & Radeau, 1990); this could bias the results. According to the preceding analysis, it seems possible to set-up the following hypotheses. If the processes beginning readers rely on partially depend on specific characteristics of each language, reading acquisition may be more difficult in English than in French, in French than in German and in German than in Spanish as a consequence of differences in the depth of the GPC in each language. In English, because of the inconsistency of GPC for vowels, we can

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expect more errors on vowels than on consonants and a stronger reliance on rime units given that taking into account word rimes reduces this inconsistency. Finally, in all four languages, spelling acquisition may be more difficult than reading acquisition because GPC are more transparent than PGC. We will consider these issues by examining the current literature on reading and spelling acquisition in English, French, German and Spanish.

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2. Phonological and orthographical processing in reading and spelling

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Most models of reading (Coltheart, Rastle, Perry, Langdon & Ziegler, 2001; Plaut & Seidenberg, 1996) and spelling (Zeziger & de Partz, 1997) assume that both phonological processing and orthographic processing are involved in word reading/spelling. Phonological processing involves the use of GPC or PGC and works well for regular words but not for those that transgress frequent GPC or PGC. Orthographic processing involves direct connections between a written or a spoken word and its occurrence in the subject’ s orthographic lexicon. Reliance on phonological processing is usually assessed via three indicators. Performance on pseudowords (PWs), as they cannot be processed via the orthographic route; the significance of the regularity effect, i.e. of the difference between regular and inconsistent words (tAble in French or English versus fEmme in French or hAve in English); the number of regularizations on words involving inconsistent GPC or PGC (Nation respectively read and spelled /nation/ and natsion in German, /nati-õ/ and nassion in French, /neiti-on/ and neishen in English; in Spanish abogado read with the phonemes /b/, /g/, /d/ instead of /ö/,/γ /,/ð/ or vaca, guerra, cerca, gente spelled baca, gerra, zerca, jente…). Reliance on orthographic processing is assessed by the significance of the effects of frequency and of lexicality, shown by the fact that frequently seen items are better processed, i.e. high frequency words versus low frequency words and words versus PWs.

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2.1 Spanish-, German- and French-Speaking Children

Spanish-speaking children It is difficult to measure a regularity effect in Spanish because GPC are rarely inconsistent. Thus, in order to assess if children rely on the phonological route, researchers take into account either PW performance or differences between

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PW and Word processing. The results show that, for example, 5 year-olds were able to read and spell more than 90% of bi-syllabic PWs including contextdependent graphemes (Cuetos, 1989). Very high scores on PW reading were found in G2 for poor and good readers (Valle-Arroyo, 1989). PW scores reported in other studies were slightly lower (Defior, Justicia & Martos, 1996; Sebastian-Gallès & Parreño-Vacchiano, 1995). When performance on PWs was compared to that of words, a lexicality effect emerged even with the younger Spanish readers (Defior et al., 1996; Valle-Arroyo, 1989). Contradictory findings were found for the frequency effect. None was observed in the ValleArroyo study, whatever the grade level (G2, G4, G6), whereas Defior et al. found such an effect for the younger children (G1 to G3), not for the older (G4 to G6), perhaps because of ceiling effects. For the younger children, the discrepancy between the results of the two studies may be accounted for by the fact that PWs and words were presented on the same list in the Valle-Arroyo study, but not in the Defior et al.’ s. When subjects read words and PWs in the same list, phonological processing is strengthened, resulting in a weakened frequency effect. These results indicate that even very young Spanish children rely on efficient reading skills.

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German-speaking children

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First graders (7;5 year-old) were asked to read and spell PWs and words; mostly one or two-syllable items with consistent GPC were used (Wimmer & Hummer, 1990). The test items were presented on the same list, except for a word spelling test. The results (see Table 1) show that these young German children relied on well developed phonological skills but were also able to use their orthographical knowledge in reading, as suggested by the lexicality effect. Reliance on orthographical processing was lesser in spelling. However, high correlations were observed between PWs and words, both in reading and spelling, as well as between the reading of PWs and of high frequency words in another study (Wimmer, 1993); this last result suggests, as stated by Wimmer (p.17), that “phonemic mediation was also involved in the reading of frequent words”. Thus, German children seem to mostly rely on phonology to process even high frequency words.

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French-speaking children In a longitudinal study, first graders were asked to read and spell highly regular words and PWs with no context-dependent graphemes such as c, g or the

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Table 1.Mean Percentage for Accuracy Scores of German First Graders (from Wimmer & Hummer, 1990) Reading

Spelling

68% 87%

70% 59%

Pseudowords Words

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intervocalic s (Sprenger-Charolles, Siegel & Bonnet, 1998b). The words and the PWs were of equivalent orthographical difficulty according to Catach (1986). In half of the items, a phoneme corresponded to every letter, except the silent e. In the other half, were included digraphs. Because this study was aimed to compare reading and spelling, the level of difficulty of GPC was also equated, as much as possible, with that of PGC. Therefore, only bigraphs which have no alternative spelling were used. Words and PWs were presented in two lists. To assess the effect of regularity, there were also inconsistent words in the word list. The results are presented in Table 2. In the middle of first grade, words were not processed any better than PWs, neither in reading, nor in spelling. At the end of the same grade, a lexicality effect was found, but only in reading. Whatever the test session, regular words were processed better than inconsistent words, the difference, as well as the mean percentage of regularizations, even increasing between sessions. These results indicate that, at the beginning of reading and spelling acquisition, French children mostly relied on phonological processing, the weight of this processing even increasing with time. They also suggest that the orthographic lexicon is progressively set-up in reading and — but to a lesser extent — in spelling. The examination of one-letter graphemes and bigraphs processing also indicates that in reading and — again to a lesser extent — in spelling, graphemes are gradually taken into account (see also SprengerCharolles & Casalis, 1995). In spite of these differences, the correlation analysis indicates strong relationships between reading and spelling (in January .70, .82, .65 for PWs, regular words and inconsistent words; in June .85, .80, .72 for the same items). In another study, second graders perfectly spelt context-independent graphemes, including bigraphs, whereas their scores for context-dependent graphemes were low (Alegria & Mousty, 1994). For context-dependent graphemes such as s, ss or c (for /s/) strong differences emerged between the dominant spelling (s) and the non-dominant (c or ss), even when the latter is the most common grapheme in a specific context (ss in intervocalic position).

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Table 2.Mean Percentage for Accuracy Scores of French First Graders (from SprengerCharolles, Siegel & Bonnet, 1998) 1st test session (6;6 year-olds)

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Spelling

Lexicality PW Word

48% 44%

48% 40%

80% 88%

78% 76%

Regularity Regular words Inconsistent words

40% 07%

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87% 38%

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These results were reproduced in another study (Alegria & Mousty, 1996) that also indicated that word frequency had no impact on the spelling performance of the younger children (beginning of G2). Thus, French children appear to begin to spell using a simplified set of PGC with no lexical involvement. The preceding studies on the development of phonological processing in reading mainly concerned grapho-phonemic units. Colé, Magnan & Grainger (1999) hypothesized that a change in the size of the phonological processing units could appear as a consequence of learning to read. The children could move from grapho-phonemes to syllables, because the cognitive cost of a syllabic processing could be less. To test this hypothesis, first graders and adults were asked to decide if a visual target presented on a computer screen was present at the beginning of the word appearing immediately after. The targets had a CV or a CVC phonological structure which corresponded — or not — to the first syllable of the following word (ca/car in carotte versus carton). Shorter detection times when the target corresponds to the first syllable of the word (ca in caramel versus car in carton) clearly indicates reliance on a phonological processing based on syllabic units. Detection times depending only on the length of the target can be explained either by an orthographic processing or by a GPC based phonological processing. The results suggest that, at least for reading acquisition in French, there could be a first step in which the children mainly rely on GPC. In a second step, when they master this grapho-phonemic processing, they could progressively activate larger grapho-phonological units, moving from the GPC to the syllable (see also Colé & Sprenger-Charolles, 1999).

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2.2 English- versus German-, French and Spanish-speaking children According to most studies, the acquisition of phonological processing in English seems to be slow and difficult. Mean accuracy for PW reading at the end of G1 typically ranges from 20% to 60% (Jorm, Share, MacLean & Matthew, 1984; Juel, Griffith & Gough, 1986; Siegel & Ryan, 1988). Because of the strong specificity of the English orthography, we only examined comparative studies in which the items were matched across languages to take into account comparable spelling difficulties.

English versus German-speaking children

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7-, 8- and 9-year-old English- and German-speaking children were asked to read number words which are similar in the two languages (e.g. three-drei, Wimmer & Goswami, 1994). PWs were derived from these words by exchanging the consonantal onsets. In PW reading, even the youngest German children made few errors, and even fewer than the oldest English children despite a smaller reading experience. Moreover, a very high correlation between PW and word reading times was observed in the youngest German group (.93), but not in the youngest English group (.58), suggesting that the German children, but not the English children, mainly relied on the same processing to read words and PWs. In another study, Frith, Wimmer and Landerl (1998), asked 7-, 8- and 9-year-old English and German children to read words which were similar in spelling, pronunciation, meaning and familiarity (e.g. Summer/Sommer, first experiment). PWs were derived from words by exchanging the onset (Rummer/Rommer). English children performed less well than German children on words (80 versus 95%); the difference was greater for PWs (59 versus 88%), especially for the 7-year-olds (45 versus 85%). In a second experiment, the effects of frequency and lexicality were manipulated. For high frequency words, 8-year-old English and German children obtained similar results whereas English children lagged behind their German age mates both for low frequency words and for PWs. The same children were asked to read trisyllabic PWs, with simple open syllables and no consonant clusters (e.g. tarulo, surimo). Accuracy and reaction times were computed. The scores of the 8-year-old English children were still lower than those of their German age mates, for accuracy (70% versus 99%) and for time latencies (4.3 sec. versus 1.9 sec.). In the same study, the errors of the English children were found to involve vowels more often than consonants (see also Bryson & Werker, 1989; Fischer, Liberman & Shank-

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weiler, 1977; Fowler, Shankweiler & Liberman, 1979; Siegel & Faux, 1989). This was not the case for German-speaking children (see also Wimmer, 1993). These results suggest that the reading skills of the German children are more efficient than those of the English children. They also indicate that German-speaking children — but not English-speaking children — mainly rely on phonological processing as suggested by the very high correlations between PW and word processing. Finally, the results observed for vowel errors are congruent with what was expected given the opacity of GPC for vowels in English.

English- versus French-speaking children

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In a cross-linguistic study, Canadian English- and French-speaking children were followed from 5;9 to 7 years of age (Bruck, Genesee & Caravolas, 1997). Word and PW reading was assessed at the end of G1. High frequency regular monosyllabic words, the spelling patterns of which are commonly taught to G1 children, were selected. PWs were constructed by changing the first letter of the words. The French and English items were equated in terms of the number of letters and of GPC. The results (see Table 3) show that at the end of G1 the French-speaking children obtained higher scores than their English age mates on PW and word reading in spite of fewer preliteracy opportunities and no reading instruction in kindergarten. These results strengthen the idea that it is easier to learn to read in a more consistent orthography. Phonological awareness had been assessed in the middle of kindergarten. In line with our linguistic description, the predictors of reading success were not the same in the two groups. The most significant predictor was onset-rime awareness for the English-speaking children and syllable segmentation for the French-speaking children.

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English- versus French and Spanish-speaking children

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In another study (see the third experiment of Goswami, Gombert & Barrera, 1998), 7-, 8- and 9-year-old English-, French- and Spanish-speaking children

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Table 3.Mean Percentage for Accuracy Scores of Canadian-English-speaking versus French-speaking First Graders (from Bruck, Genesee & Caravolas, 1997).

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French

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63% 76%

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were required to read monosyllabic and bisyllabic words and orthographically or phonologically (O/P) analog or non-analog (+/−) PWs (in English, tape, fape [O+P+], faish [O−P−]; in French, voile, roile [O+P+], loave [O−P−]; in Spanish: mientes, lientes [O+P+], teslien [O−P−]). For each age level, the three groups were matched as closely as possible in reading age and in knowledge of the real words from which the PWs were derived. The overall scores of the Spanish children (89%) were higher than those of the French children (72%) who read significantly more PWs than the English children (52%). Table 4 shows the results of the younger children (7 year-olds) for familiar (O+P+) and unfamiliar (O−P−) monosyllabic versus bisyllabic PWs. The results of the Spanish children were already very high; the presence of a length effect suggests that they relied on efficient phonological processing mainly based on GPC. The lowest scores were obtained by the English children, the French children being in between. A strong effect of familiarity was found, both for French and English children, but not for Spanish children, perhaps because of ceiling effects. However the French and English unfamiliar PWs looked very strange (in French loave, yede, chaitsa, lonmal; in English, foaj, verrpil…), and this could explain why the scores are so low (12.5% in English and 53.8% in French). If these PWs are excluded, the scores (31% and 73% for English and French children) are similar to those reported in other studies with children of almost the same age (36% for English children and 63% for French children in Bruck et al., 1997; 80% for French children in Sprenger-Charolles et al., 1998b and 72% in Sprenger-Charolles & Siegel, 1997).

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I M A German-speaking children English- versus French Jand N The results of a French B E study in which 8 year-olds were required to read trisyllabic PWs with simple open syllables and without consonant clusters (i.e. tibulo, butiro) N H JO Τable © 4.Percentage of PWs read correctly by Spanish, French and English 7-year-olds

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(from Goswami et al., 1998).

Monosyllables

Spanish French English

Bisyllables

O+P+

O−P−

O+P+

O−P−

95.8% 71.4% 28.7%

94.3% 52.9% 11.8%

87% 74.5% 32.8%

83.3% 54.7% 13.2%

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can be compared to those of the study of Frith et al. (1998), where same age German and English children were asked to read similarly constructed PWs (e.g. tarulo, surimo). The French children obtained high scores (84%, see the results of the 8-year-old average readers in Sprenger-Charolles, Colé, Lacert & Serniclaes, 20003), between those obtained by German and English children of the same age (99% versus 70%). In these two studies, time latencies were taken into account but not in the same way. In the Frith et al. study (1998), children were instructed to press the mouse button as soon as they felt able to read the word aloud; reading latencies were measured from onset of stimulus presentation. In the French study, the measure was more direct as the responses were recorded by the integrated speech sampler of a computer and time latencies were calculated via the analysis of the speech signal. However, this methodological difference cannot account for the large gap observed between French and English children (1.4 sec. compared to 4.3 sec.; 1.9 for the German children). In this very simple reading task, English-speaking 8-year-olds again seem to master less well phonological processing than their German and French counterparts. As already observed, English children’s errors involved vowels more often than consonants (Frith et al., 1998; Bryson & Werker, 1989; Fischer et al., 1977; Fowler et al., 1979; Siegel & Faux, 1989). For French children (Sprenger-Charolles & Siegel, 1997), as for German children (Frith et al., 1998), there were never more vowel errors than consonant errors. These differences could be explained by vowels being much more inconsistent in English than in French or German.

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2.3 Linguistic and instructional factors in reading and spelling acquisition

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The results could be explained by linguistic differences but also by instructional approaches, the two factors being interrelated. Consistent orthography leads to teaching by phonic methods, whereas inconsistent orthography demands more complex methods. The developmental trajectory could be sensitive to the teaching method. For example, French-speaking second graders taught by a phonic method reached a higher level of phonological and, surprisingly, of orthographic skills, than children taught by a whole-word method (respectively 77.3 and 53.8% for PWs, 33.4 and 22.7% for inconsistent words, Leybaert & Content, 1995). English-speaking children also benefited when taught by a systematic phonic approach (Snowling, 1996). Nevertheless, the strongest influence seems to stem from the language to which the children are exposed. Learning to read in a shallow orthography leads to the use of phonological processing whereas learning to read in a deep orthography leads to less reliance

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on this processing, and, perhaps, to non-phonological compensatory strategies. As noticed by Frith et al. (1998), English children, compared to German children, proved to be more sensitive to word frequency and to make more lexicalisation errors (the target item being replaced by another word), suggesting that they might use top-down lexical representations to supplement errorprone bottom-up processes.

3. Tentative explanation

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Phonological processing seems to be the sine-qua-non of reading and spelling acquisition. Reliance on this processing permits PWs as well as known and unknown regular words to be read or spelled. In reading, through the use of the phonological procedure and through the comparison of decoded words with those that are part of their oral vocabulary, children can learn to associate sublexical orthographic units with sublexical phonological units. On the one hand, when Grapheme-Phoneme Correspondences (GPC) are almost regular, as in Spanish, reliance on the phonological procedure very often leads to the production of the correct word. Thus, in shallow orthographies, reading skills burst out very rapidly. On the other hand, when the number of inconsistent words is significant, as in English, and to a lesser extent in French, reliance on the GPC procedure sometimes leads to a reading error and reading acquisition is slowed down because of some incoherence between sublexical and lexical outputs. However, even highly inconsistent words contain some regular GPC to rely on and some inconsistencies are only a question of grapheme frequency. For example, the use of French GPC leads to the pronunciation of the high frequency word femme as /fem/. Knowing that /fem/ does not exist, but that /fam/ does, children can infer that e must be read /a/ in this word. Children may learn most of the relationships between orthography and phonology through this implicit procedure. It is possible to assume that, as a function of print exposure and of grapheme-phoneme and of word frequencies, strong associations between orthographic and phonological units are set-up, first at the sublexical level, and later at the lexical level, at least for words that are practiced sufficiently often. This process enables the construction of the orthographic lexicon. Nevertheless, even when this lexicon is functional, the phonological procedure remains operational and becomes even more and more efficient as the various associations between sublexical orthographic and phonemic units are consolidated (see Booth, Perfetti & MacWhinney, 1999).

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Grapheme-phoneme consistency seems then to play a major role in learning to read, and explains why learning to read in a shallow orthography is easier than in deeper ones, i.e. in Spanish, German and French compared to English, or in Spanish compared to French. It may also help to understand why the weight of the associations between sublexical orthographic and phonological units depends on the specificities of each language. For example, the process of building GPC for vowels in English being difficult, vowels may be taken into account only in a second phonological cycle (see Berent & Perfetti, 1995) and/or be processed with the following consonants as their pronunciation is often more consistent when relying on word rimes (Goswami & Bryant, 1990). This can also explain why in French, characterized by a rather clear syllabic structure and no word stress, children seem to rely on a phonological processing based, first on GPC, and then on syllabic units (Colé et al., 1999). Spelling scores being lower than reading scores might be explained by the asymmetry between orthography-to-phonology consistency (reading) and phonology-to-orthography consistency (spelling), the degree of inconsistency of the latter being higher than that of the former. Moreover, to know a spoken word may facilitate the reading of this word, but not the choice of its correct spelling. For example, in French, to know the oral form /tablo/ does not help to choose between o as in ‘numéro’, au as in ‘sauter’ or eau as in ‘chateau’. Those two reasons might explain why reliance on orthographical processing is lesser in spelling than in reading (Wimmer & Hummer, 1990; Sprenger-Charolles et al., 1998b) and why, because of the strong inconsistency of French PGC, children probably begin to spell using a simplified set of PGC with no lexical involvement (Alegria & Mousty, 1996). There is a further difference between reading and spelling in French. In word spelling, but not in word reading, digraphs are less well processed than simple graphemes (Sprenger-Charolles & al., 1998b, Sprenger-Charolles & Casalis, 1995). This difference may be explained by the fact that, if the basic unit of phonological processing is the grapheme, when items contain a digraph readers have fewer units to assemble than when they are only composed of single letter graphemes. In the former case, there are also fewer phonemic units to program for an oral response. On the other hand, the use of PGC to spell items which contain a digraph necessitates the transformation of a simple unit (one phoneme) to a complex one (a digraph). This latter operation might have a higher cognitive cost. In spite of these differences, the correlation analysis indicates strong relationships between reading and spelling (Sprenger-Charolles, Siegel & Bechennec, 1998a, SprengerCharolles et al., 1998b; Wimmer, 1993) suggesting high similarities between

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these two skills, at least at the beginning of reading and spelling acquisition. If learning to read and spell depended only on the depth of the correspondences between a spoken and a written language, there would be few dyslexics, for example in Spanish and German. This seems not to be the case (see for Spanish, Lopez & Jimenez-Gonzalez, 2000; for German, Wimmer, 1993, 1995). The most striking finding is that all dyslexics, whatever the transparency of their written language, were found to have weak phonological reading skills as suggested by their scores in PW reading (see, for English, the meta-analyses of Rack, Snowling & Olson, 1992 and of Van Ijzendoorn & Bus, 1994; for French, Sprenger-Charolles et al., 2000; for German, Wimmer, 1993, 1995; for Spanish, Lopez & Jimenez-Gonzalez, 2000). In French, German and Spanish, where GPC are more consistent than in English, the phonological deficit showed up mainly in processing time, not in accuracy scores. Thus, when GPC are almost regular, dyslexics may overcome — at least partially — the difficulties they suffer in setting-up reading phonological processing to reach a near to correct level of accuracy, but at the cost of a slow processing. This deficiency could be due to an underlying deficit which impedes the establishment of accurate and strong associations between graphemes and phonemes. To establish these connections, the phonemic representations of the children must be well-specified. If they were not well specified, as seems to be the case for the dyslexic children (see for English, Adlard & Hazan, 1998; Godfrey, Syrdal-Lasky, Millay & Knox, 1981; Manis, McBride-Chang, Seidenberg, Keating, Doi, Munson & Petersen, 1997; Mody, Studdert-Kennedy & Brady, 1997; Werker & Tees, 1987; for French, Serniclaes, Sprenger-Charolles, Carré & Demonet, 2001), the connections between graphemes and phonemes would be difficult to establish. This would lead to a reading deficit which could appear more or less significant depending on the transparency of the written language in which dyslexics learn to read (see Paulesu, Demonet, Fazio, McCrory, Chanoine, Brunswick, Cappa, Cossu, Habib, Frith, & Frith, 2001). Thus learning to read and spell could depend on two interrelated factors. On the one hand, the more transparent is the written language, easier it is to learn to read and spell and fewer appear to be the reading difficulties of the dyslexics. On the other hand, the quality of the phonemic representations of the children influences the ease with which they learn to read and spell; the less specified they are, the more difficult would be reading and spelling acquisition. This last phonological factor could be a universal root of reading and spelling acquisition and of dyslexia.

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Notes *We would like to thank Jean-Pierre Jaffré and Willy Serniclaes for their very helpful comments. The help of Susannah Parkin in proof reading is gratefully acknowledged. 1. A phoneme is a family of sounds which signal a difference in meaning: for example, /t/ and /d/ are different phonemes in English, French, German and Spanish which differentiate ‘to’ and ‘do’ in English, ‘toux’ and ‘doux’ in French, ‘tank’ and ‘dank’ in German, ‘tos’ and ‘dos’ in Spanish. The phonemes /r/ and /rr/ are only part of the phonemic inventory of the Spanish language (pera /’pera/ versus perra /’perra/).

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2. Consistency in reading corresponds to the proportion of words containing a given orthographic unit with the same pronunciation as the target word relative to the total number of words containing that particular unit; the same logic applies in spelling.

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3. These results were published together with those of another list of PWs in SprengerCharolles et al. (2000).

References

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C G Adlard, Alan, & Hazan, Valerie. 1998. Speech perception in children with specific reading N difficulties (Dyslexia). The Quarterly Journal of Experimental IPsychology 51A:153–77. H Alegria, Jesus, & Mousty, Philippe. 1994. On the development and non-lexical I Schildren.ofInlexical procedures of French-speaking normal and disabled G. D. A. Brown & Nick L C. Ellis (eds.), Handbook of spelling: Theory,Bprocess and intervention, 213–26. New U York: Wiley and Sons. P ———. 1996. The development of spelling S procedures in French-speaking, normal and N reading disabled children: Effects of I frequency and of lexicality. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 63:312–338. AM Berent, Iris, & Perfetti, Charles, A. 1995. A Rose is a REEZ: The two cycles model of phonolJ ogy assembly in reading English. Psychological Review 102:146–184. N E Charles. A., & MacWhinney, Brian. 1999. Quick, automatic, and Booth, James. R., Perfetti, B general activation of orthographic and phonological representations in young readers. N Psychology 35:3–19. Developmental H Bruck,O J Maggie, Genesee, Fred, & Caravolas, Markéta. 1997. A cross linguistic study of early literacy acquisition. In Benita Blachman (ed.), Foundations of reading acquisition and © dyslexia: Implications for early intervention, 145–162. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum

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Colé, Pascale, & Sprenger-Charolles, Liliane. 1999. Traitement syllabique au cours de la reconnaissance de mots écrits chez des enfants dyslexiques, lecteurs en retard et normolecteurs de 11 ans. Revue de Neuropsychologie 4:323–60. Coltheart, Max, Rastle, Kathleen, Perry, Conrad, Langdon, Robyn, & Ziegler, Johannes. 2001. DRC : A dual route cascaded model of visual word recognition and reading aloud. Psychological Review 108,1:204–56 Content, Alain, Mousty, Philippe, & Radeau, Monique. 1990. Brulex: une base de données lexicales informatisée pour le Français écrit et parlé. Année Psychologique 90:551–66. Coulmas, Florian. 1996. The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Writing Systems. Oxford, UK : Blackwell. Cuetos, Fernando. 1989. Lectura y escritura de palabras a traves de la ruta phonologica. Infencia y Aprendizaje 45:71–84. Defior, Sylvia, Justicia, Fernando, & Martos, Francisco. 1996. The influence of lexical and sublexical variables in normal and poor Spanish readers. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal 8:487–97. Delattre, Pierre. 1965. Comparing the phonetic features of English, French, German and Spanish. Heidelberg: Jumius Gross Verlag. Deschamps, Alain. 1994. De l’écrit à l’oral et de l’oral à l’écrit: Phonétique et orthographe de l’anglais. Paris: Ophrys. Fischer, F. William, Liberman, Isabelle Y., & Shankweiler, Donald. 1977. Reading reversals and developmental dyslexia: A further study. Cortex 14:496–510. Fowler, Carol A., Shankweiler, Donald, & Liberman, Isabelle Y. 1979. Apprehending spelling patterns for vowels: A longitudinal study. Language and Speech 22:243–52. Frith, Uta, Wimmer, Heinz, & Landerl, Karin. 1998. Differences in phonological recoding in German- and English-speaking children. Scientific Study of Reading 2:31–54. Godfrey, John J., Syrdal-Lasky, Ann K., Millay, Kathleen K., & Knox, Carol M. 1981. Performance of dyslexic children on speech tests. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 32: 401–4 Goswami, Usha C., Gombert, Jean-Emile, & Fraca de Barrera, Lucia. 1998. Children’s orthographic representations and linguistic transparency: nonsense word reading in English, French and Spanish. Applied Psycholinguistics 19:19–52. Goswami, Usha C., & Bryant, Peter. 1990. Phonological skills and learning to read. Hove (East Sussex): Lawrence Erlbaum Associates LTD. Jorm, Anthony F., Share, David L., MacLean, Rod, & Matthiews, Russel G. 1984. Phonological recoding skill and learning to read: A longitudinal study. Applied Psycholinguistics 5:201–07. Juel, Connie, Griffith, Priscilla L., & Gough, Philip B. 1986. Acquisition of literacy: A longitudinal study of children in first and second grade. Journal of Educational Psychology 78:243–55. Leybaert, Jacqueline, & Content, Alain. 1995. Reading and spelling acquisition in two different teaching methods: A test of the independence hypothesis. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal 7:65–88.

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Appendix: Phoneme-Grapheme Correspondences in Spanish, German, French and English Stop

/p/

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P posta /’posta/

P-PP-Binc Poste /pfst/ Pappe /’pap6/ ab /ap/

P-PP poste /pfst/ approche /aprfw/

Binc-Vinc baca /’baka/

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Binc-BB bei /bai/ Ebbe /’7:b6/

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Tinc-TT-Dinc-TH alt/alt/ Bett /b7t/ Hand /hant/ Theater /te’":t6r/

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B-BB table /tabl6/ abbé /abe/

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inc -DD adoptieren /adop’ti:r6n/ addieren /a’di:r6n/

inc -TT-TH halte /alt6/ cette /c7t/

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P-PP post /p6~st/ approach /6’pr6~tw/

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B-BB table /’teIbl/ ebb /eb/

Tinc-TT halt/h_lt/ sitting /’sItI] /

théâtre /te"tr6/ D-DD-DHe adopter /adfpte/ addition /adisjf/ adhérer /adere/

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Cnc-K-QU

/k/

Cinc-K-KK-CK CHe-Ginc Clou /klu/

clima /’klima/ kilo /’kilo/

Cinc-CC-Q(U) K-CK-CHe climat /klima/ accord /akfr/ kilo /kilo/

Cinc-CC-K-CK QUinc-Q-CH climate /’klaIm6t/ accord /6’kf:d/ kilo /’ki:l6~/

ticket /tik7/ quand /k"/, coq /kfk/ quadruple /kwadrypl6/ chronique /krfnik/

ticket /’tIkIt/ quay /ki:/ quick /kwIk/ school /sku:l/

Ginc-GG Garage /ga’r":Š6/ Aggression /agr7si’o:n/

Ginc-GG-G(U)inc-Ce garage /garaŠ/ aggraver /agrave/ guerre/g7r/ aiguille /egCij/ second /s6gf/

Ginc-GG-G(U)inc-GHinc garage /gæ’ra:Š / /-rIdŠ/ aggravate/’ægr6veIt guard /g":d/ language /’læ]gwIdŠ/ ghost /g6~st/

M-MM Blume /’blu:m6/ Flamme /’flam6/

Minc-MM ami /ami/ flamme /flam/ (Nasal vowels: bombe /bfb/)

Klima /’kli:ma/ Akkord /a’kort/ Rock /rfk/

que /ke/ Quatsch /kvatS/ Chronik /’kro:nik/ Tag /t":k/ Ginc-G(U)inc garaje /ga’raχe/

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guerra /’gerra/ guardia /’gwarðja/

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M flamear /flame’ar/

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ñ niño /’ni\o/

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NG parking /parki]/

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N-NN Nation /natsi’o:n/ dann /dan/

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Angst /a]st/ Onkel /’o]k6l/

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Ninc-NN nation /nasjf/ bonne /bfn/ (Nasal vowels: bon /bf/)

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M-MM flame/fleIm/ flammable /’flæm6bl6/

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N-NN nation /’neIw6n/ granny /’grænI/

GN gagner /ga\e/ NG parking /parki]/

NG-N(K) parking /’p":kI]/ think /θI]k/

PF Pferd /pfe:rt/ Zinc-Cinc-TZ-Tinc zentral /ts7n’tr":l/ circa /’tsirka/ Putz /puts/ Nation /natsi’o:n/ CHinc-TCH such /s% %tw/; scotch /sk#tw/

CH chàchara /’twatwara/

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/dŠŠ/

J-Ginc-DJ-DG job /dŠ#b/ agenda /6’dŠend6/ adjust /6’dŠ% %st/ bridge /brIdŠ FRICATIVE Spanish

cp

inc

/ß/

B -V baba /’baßa/ uva /’ußa/

/f/

F foto /’foto/

Z-Cinc cerca /’θerka/ nariz /na’riθ/

/θ/

/ð/cp

R O

Dinc-DHe dado /’daðo/ adherir /aðe’rir/

C N

/s/

S

/z/

J

French

English

F-FF-Vinc-PH Feld /f7lt/ Giraffe /gi’raf6/ Photo /’fo:to/ Vater /’f":t6r/

F-FF-PH fable /fabl(6)/ affirme /afirm(6)/ photo /foto/

F-FF-GHinc-PH fable /’feIbl/ affirm /6’f8:m/ photo /’f6~t6~/ laugh /l":f

W-Vinc Vase /’v":z6/ Wagen /’v":g6n/

V-W vase /v"z(6)/ wagon /vagf/

N H O

E R

M JA

IN

T C S

Sinc-SS-ß

/als/ N alsKissen E /’kis6n/ B

salchicha /sal’twitwa

©

German

inc

/v/

U

31

Soße/’zo:s6/

Sinc-(T)Z Rose /’ro:z6/ setzen /’z7ts6n/

P

D E

L B U

I

I H S

P

O R

THinc theater /’θI6t6r/

THinc this /ðIs/

Sinc-Cinc/Ç-SS Tinc-Xe-SC saucisse /sosis/ tasse /tas/ centre /s"tr6/ ça /sa/ nation /nasjf/ six /sis/ science /sj"s/

Sinc-Cinc-SS-SC

Sinc-Z-Xinc rose /roz/ zéro /zero/ deuxième /døzj7m/

Sinc-Z rose/r6~z/ zero /’zI6r6~/

1st proofs

Y N A

P M V-W O C/v":z/ or /veIz/ vase wagon /’væg6n/ G N inc

sausage /’s#sIdŠ/ assess /6’ses/ cease /si:s/

science /saI6ns/

S F O

32


/ww/

SCH-Sinc-CHinc Charge /’warŠ6/ Tasche /’taw6/

CH-SCH charge/warŠ6/ schema /wema/

SH-CHinc-SCH-Tinc machine /m6’wi:n/ schedule /’wedju:l/ share /we6r / nation /’neIw6n/

Ginc-J garage /garaŠ/ jeudi /Šødi/

Ginc-Sinc garage /gæ’ra:Š / /-rIdŠ/ measure /’meŠ6r/

Straße /’StrA:s«/ /ŠŠ /

Ginc-Jinc Garage/ga’r":Š6/ journalismus /Šurnal — -/

/ç/

CHinc Ginc trächtig /’tr7çtiç/

/γ /cp

/χ /

Ginc abogado /aßo’γaðo/ inc

inc

J-G jarabe /χa’raße/ gente /’χente/

CH Nacht /naχt/

/h/

H Höhe /’hø:6/

Spanish /r/

U

R O

Rin curioso /ku’rjoso/

C N

/rr/

RR-Rinc perro /’perro/ raro /’rraro/

/l/

L color /ko’lor/

© /λ/

HN

E R

German

BE

J OLL

T C

RESONANT

A NJ

M

L B UR-RR French

S

L-LL Kolorit /kflf’ri:t/ mille /’mil6/

I

I H S

P curieux /kyrjø/

R-RR kurios /kuri’o:s/ irregulär /iregu’l7:r

IN

D E

P

O R OM r

English

irrégulier /iregylje/

Rinc-RR curious /’kj~6rI6s/ irregular /I’regj~l6r/

L-LL couleur /kulœr/ ville /vil/

L-LL color /’k% %l6r/ billow /’bIl6~/

SEMI-CONSONANT German

Y N A

HC G N hair /h6 /

millón /mi’λon

Spanish

P

S F O

French

1st proofs

English


/j/

Iinc-Y viaje /’bjaχe/ ya /ja/

Jinc-Le

Iinc-(I)LLinc-Yinc ciel /sj7l/ paye /p7j/ fille /fij/

Billard /’biljart/ ja /ja:/

Uinc (+I) tuile /tCil/ Uinc sueño /’swe\o/

Winc walk /wf:k/

OI-OU loi /lwa/ oui /wi/

inc: inconsistent graphemes (more than one pronunciation) e: examples of exceptional grapheme-phoneme correspondences cp: contextual phoneme (/ß/,/γ/,/ð/ in Spanish)

Authors’ addresses LEAPLE UMR 8606 7 rue Guy Môquet BP8, F-94801 Villejuif Cedex [email protected]

U

C N ©

Yinc-Iinc … million /’mIlj6n/ yes /jes/ new /nju:/

/ 1/

/w/

JO

R O

HN

B

J N E

E R AM

I

T C

NS

33

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P NG

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OM

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C N ©

JO

R O

HN

B

J N E

E R AM

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T C

NS

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