The influence of English spelling patterns on pronunciation

Two experiments are reported which investigate the process of converting written English into speech. In Experiment I, subjects read aloud sentences that contained nonsense words, and the spelling and grammatical category of the nonsense word were systematically varied. The location of primary stress in each nonsense word was found to depend on the phonemic form, grammatical category, and spelling of the word, in ways similar to those predicted by Chomsky and Halle's (1968) stress assignment rules. Experiment II, in which subjects judged the morphemic structure and apparent foreignness of each of the nonsense words used in Experiment I, showed that many of the interactions observed between experimental factors in Experiment I could be interpreted in terms of morphemic differences between different groups of words. An additive model for the operation of these rules is proposed.