Development of context-sensitive pronunciation in reading: The case of ‹c› and ‹g

• Published in: Journal of experimental child psychology Vol. 182; pp. 114 - 125
• Main Authors: Treiman, Rebecca, Kessler, Brett
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Elsevier Inc 01.06.2019
• Subjects: Decoding; Reading; Spelling-to-sound correspondences; Sublexical context; Spelling-to-sound correspondences; Reading; Decoding; Sublexical context
• ISSN: 0022-0965; 1096-0457
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jecp.2019.02.001

•Learning to decode words is difficult when spelling-to-sound relations are complex.•Pronunciation of letters in English may be influenced by context.•Two studies examined development of context use for initial ‹c› and ‹g›.•Use of adjacent and nonadjacent context was slow to develop in children. Writing systems sometimes deviate from one-to-one associations between letters and phonemes, but the deviations are often predictable from sublexical context. For initial ‹c› and ‹g› in English, deviations from the typical /k/ and /g/ pronunciations are influenced by adjacent context (the following vowel, as in center vs. canter) and nonadjacent context (the presence of a Latinate vs. basic suffix, as in gigantic vs. giggling). We conducted two experiments with participants ranging in reading level from early elementary school to university to study the development of context use. Experiment 1 focused on adjacent context, and Experiment 2 also examined nonadjacent context. Use of context developed slowly, and readers at all levels were not as influenced by it as would be expected given the contextual effects in the English vocabulary. We discuss possible reasons for these phenomena and the need to teach children to use context more effectively.