Washington University in St. Louis / Psychology / Brett Kessler

Heather Correspondences for Ponto

Model of alignment is that we align only one letter to any given phone. Therefore several letters are omitted from the alignment. Even obvious digraphs such as <th> /θ/ have one aligned letter and one unaligned one: [θ=t][=h]. These letters can be handled by setting the Insertion penalty to 0.

Preferably only one phoneme is aligned with a given letter, when that is at all reasonable; but there are exceptional cases such as /wən/ <one> where blindly following that rule would be silly; thus [wə=o].

We try to make commonsense assignments. In case of doubt, the leftmost letter is assumed to bear the main weight of expressing the sound. This seems to be a guiding principle of the spelling system; e.g., [θ=t][=h] makes more sense than [=t][θ=h], because <h> appears after several letters to modify their basic sound). In a few cases it doesn't seem historically accurate, e.g. -ation gets the schwa assigned to the <i>; but hard to say how people interpret that nowadays.

This list is based on words from Zeno et al.’s Educators Word Frequency Guide. It uses the words where the WFG breaks the statistics down by grade, and the word is found in one of the grades between kindergarten and Grade 12, inclusive. Pronunciations were derived from the Carnegiue Mellon Pronouncing Dictionary. An alignment program was used to give the most plausible single-letter alignments.

This table gives for each alignment a sample word, as well as a token (frequency-weighted) count of the number of words that use that correspondence.