Spelling to Pronunciation Transparency Ratings
Applying common decoding rules to an English word does not always provide its actual pronunciation given the quasiregular nature of the English orthography. The reader must then make the match between the sounded out form they arrived at during decoding with that word’s actual pronunciation stored in memory. Some words are more difficult to make this match than others. Spelling to pronunciation transparency ratings measure the ease at arriving at the correct pronunciation for a word by applying typical decoding rules on a scale of 1-6 with 1 representing words that are very easy to match to its pronunciation and 6 representing words that are very difficult to match. The purpose of this study was to create a database of spelling to pronunciation transparency ratings for 20,404 words, made available in the supplemental materials to be used in future analyses. Results of a multiple regression revealed variance in ratings to be unaccounted for by other available word features, demonstrating the uniqueness of these ratings. Furthermore, results showed that on average words that contained at least one schwa received higher ratings than words that did not contain a schwa. Lastly, words classified as strange were rated as more difficult than those classified as exception words which were rated higher than regular words, demonstrating the association between spelling to pronunciation transparency ratings and regularity.