Glossa Psycholinguist. 2025;4(1):2. doi: 10.5070/G60116584. Epub 2025 Jan 13.
ABSTRACT
Vowel letters are a source of difficulty in reading English words, for they have both long and short pronunciations. In two studies, we examined how vowels are pronounced before different types of medial consonants in the words of English and the degree to which skilled readers follow those vocabulary statistics in their behavior. We found more short vowels before sequences beginning with ‹s› than before those such as ‹pl›, regardless of whether the letter after ‹s› corresponded to a stop consonant (e.g., ‹sp›) or a sonorant (e.g., ‹sl›). These results show that pronunciation of vowels is influenced by the nature and not just the number of following consonants, contrary to the assumptions that commonly underlie phonics instruction. Although the results support a statistical learning view of reading, in that participants showed an implicit use of untaught patterns, participants’ pronunciations differed in some ways from those expected, given the vocabulary statistics.
PMID:40099278 | PMC:PMC11912810 | DOI:10.5070/G60116584
