The Influence of Orthography on the Pronunciation of English C-spelled Words

The Influence of Orthography on the Pronunciation of English C-spelled Words

  Given that written and spoken forms of English are not always corresponding, this paper investigated the influence of the English orthography 〈c〉 on its pronunciations in c-spelled words by conducting an experiment, since the English spelling 〈c〉 has two different pronunciations [k] and [s]. The results of the experiment showed that most of the participants had a difficulty in producing target [s] in the word groups of 〈c+e〉 and 〈c+i〉, as they tended to replace [s] with [k] in these groups of words. Yet, this word-group effect interacted with a positional effect, in that 〈c+e〉 words showed a higher error rate in word-initial onset position, even though the overall error rates were highest in word-medial onset position. Further, error patterns were examined by position, and there were more error patterns in medial and final positions than in initial position, although the error rate was not high in final position.