Paul Stewart

Charles Read is professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1971. He has studied primarily phonetic and phonological influences on beginning spelling and reading.

Publications

Read, C. (1971). Pre-school children's knowledge of English phonology. Harvard Educational Reveiw, 41, 1-34.

Read, C. (1975). Children's Categorization of Speech Sounds in English. Urbana, IL. National Council of Teachers of English.

Read, C. (1986). The ability to manipulate speech sounds depends on knowing alphabetic writing. Cognition, 24, 31-44.

Read, C. (1986). Children's creative spelling.. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Read, C. (1994). The spelling system of English. Encyclopedia of English Studies and Language Arts. NCTE, 11, 1100-1103.

Outline

Introduction

Categorization

Vowels

Affrication

Nasals

Syllabic Segments

Alternations

Conclusion

The term Phonology refers to the sound system of our language, a system of regular processes that determine the pronunciation of English. Part of what we acquire in learning a language is mastery of these processes, so that when we encounter a new or unfamiliar word, we automatically (and for the most part, unconsciously) know some aspects of its pronunciation. Exactly how and when we acquire our unconscious mastery of these rules remains largely a mystery; it is clear that we do not memorize individual pronunciations (since the rules extend to new words and sentences) and that we do not learn them directly from a study of English spelling. In fact, a child must bring some knowledge of English phonology to his first encounter with reading and writing. As part of his knowledge of his language, a child must learn to attend to certain phonetic differences and to abstract from others in a specific and systematic way. Evidently, children possess some phonological knowledge of this sort in their pre-school years (Read 1971).

Young children tacitly categorize the phones of English, sometimes in rather surprising ways. “Categorization” in this case refers to the following type of phenomenon: children and adults can discriminate the English phones {t}, {s}, and {z}, as in tip, sip, and zip, but beyond this phonemic discrimination, they can recognize similarity relations, in that {s} and {z} are regarded as more similar than {s} and {t}. Speech recognition itself is categorical. Without this property, speech communication as we know it would be impossible. If two discriminably different speech sounds could never be regarded as the same, or functionally alike, we would recognize very few words, since almost all normal human utterances are noticeably different in some respect (Read 1975).

Edward Sapir emphasized the linguistic importance of such categorization in “Sounds Patterns in Language,” in the first volume of Language (1925). He clearly anticipates his article on the psychological reality of the phoneme (1933) with the observation that it is extraordinarily difficult for a native speaker “to make phonetic distinctions that {do} not correspond to ‘points in the pattern of his language,’” but the patterns that Sapir refers to primarily concern the speaker’s recognition of relationships among contrasting speech sounds. The relationship between spelling and speech sound categorization is a rather profound one: all alphabetic spelling represents some level of phonetic or phonological classification. A detailed record of the speech signal, such as a sound spectrogram, proves very difficult to read, and a detailed articulatory representation is not a serious candidate for a practical Orthography. Standard English spelling, near the other extreme, is phonetically highly abstract; it adopts a consistent spelling for the phonetically (and phonemically) varying forms of meaningful elements (Venezky, 1970).

The representations of vowels present the categorical problem in its basic form: there are simply too many distinct vowels to be represented uniquely by the letters available, and there are English vowels that do not occur in the letter-names. The degree of classification required is made even greater by two striking facts: the children tended to represent the vowels by single letters, rather than using digraphs or other devices to increase the number of available symbols, and with few exceptions, they confined themselves to the letters, A, E, I, O and U. Therefore, some 16 functionally distinct vowels were represented in large part by 5 symbols (Read 1975).

Affricate consonants begin as stops (most often an alveolar, such as {t} or {d}) but release as a fricative (such as {s} or {z} or, in a couple of languages, into a fricative trill) rather than directly into the following vowel.

Another interesting feature of the children’s spelling is the treatment of the nasals, {m}, {n}, and {g}, as in bumpy, end, and sing, respectively. Initially within a syllable, only the first two occur in English, and in this position, the children spell them in the usual way:

These two nasals in the final position also receive the standard spelling:

But when any of the nasals occurs before a consonant, the children almost always omit it from spelling:

This treatment of pre-consonantal nasals is quite general and consistent; it is the usual (almost without exception) spelling for all the children up to about age five. Then most of them begin to represent the nasal, but still frequently omit it (Read 1971).

r controlled vowels & Sonorant consonants

When {r}, {l}, {m}, or {n} occur in an English word between two consonants or at the end of a word after a consonant, they become syllabic—that is, the segment constitutes a sonority peak (in effect, a loudness maximum) and is perceived as a separate syllable. Because they know that the peak of most syllables is a vowel, and possibly influenced by the conventional spelling, adults perceive a vowel before the liquid or nasal. This perceived vowel is usually spelled e and may be represented either before or after the syllabic segment. The children virtually never represent such a vowel (Read 1971).

One effect of not representing predictable phonetic variation in English spelling is the alternate forms of certain lexical items are spelled uniformly. The past tense ending is ed, whether it occurs in its voiceless variant as in hopped, voiced in hogged, or with a vowel as in wanted. Exceptional spelling occur where some aspect of pronunciation is not predictable; for the past tense, there are two main cases: (1) truly exceptional verb alternations such as go/went, where presumably nothing in the past form is predictable, and (2) a tense-lax alternation in medial vowels, a subregularity of the language restricted to certain verbs and indicated by a final consonant cluster, as in creep/crept (Read 1971).

There is evidence that children can tacitly recognize certain phonetic contrasts and similarities, in that they represent these in their original spelling. For systematic reasons, standard English spelling does not reflect these same relationships. The contrasts, such as that between the first segments of tuck and truck are predicable in context and therefore irrelevant to meaning and its representation in spelling. Parents need to accept their child’s own spelling efforts and if able provide simple materials, i.e., block, elementary alphabet toys, then paper and pencil. There is that fear in many parents that a child’s own efforts will lead to “bad habits,” a belief that English spelling is bizarre, and a reliance on the expertise of professional teachers. Finally, children can make abstract inferences about the sound system of their language before they learn to read and write.

Read, C. (1971). Pre-school children's knowledge of English phonology. Harvard Educational Reveiw, 41, 1-34.

Read, C. (1975). Children's Categorization of Speech Sounds in English. Urbana, IL. National Council of Teachers of English.

Sapir, E. (1925). Sounds patterns in langauge. Language, I,37-51.

Sapir, E. (1933). La realite psychologique des phonemes. Journal of Psychologie Normale et Pathologique, 30, 247-265.

Venezky, R. L., (1970). The structure of English orthogrphy. The Hague: Mouton.

Charles W. Read

International Reading Association

Reading Rockets

'Holes' in the Brain Help Us Sort Out Sounds

Categorization of speech sounds by Norwegian/English bilinguals

Invented Spelling

Commentary by Maleesa Redish

First of all I would like to tell you how informative I found your page. All of the vocab links were very helpful. The only thing I would like to see change is the fact that your page is not introduced with info on Charles Read. I expected to see some background info on him right off, in addition to his research and findings. Overall, nice job!

Commentarty by Crystal Wise

I thought your paper was great! You had a lot of great information. I noticed that the section on nasals was not packed with a wealth of information. I found a website on the role of nasals when reading. I thought it may be of some help. =)

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?

cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=11527322&dopt=Abstract

Commentary by Kim Freeman

Your paper is nicely written. I would like to know a little more about Charles Read. I think it would be interesting to have a little more background.I looked on the Barnes and Nobles website to see if he has written any books. I found one written in 1975 -Children's Categorization of Speech Sounds in English.I went to the books a million website and found a more recent book he co-authored-Acoustic Analysis of Speech (2002).