Number and syllabification of following consonants influence use of long versus short vowels in English disyllables

Abstract

Spelling-to-sound translation in English is particularly complex for vowels. For example, the pronunciations of ‹a› include the long vowel of ‹paper› and ‹sacred› and the short vowel of ‹cactus› and ‹happy›. We examined the factors that are associated with use of long versus short vowels by conducting analyses of English disyllabic words with single medial consonants and consonant sequences and three behavioral studies in which a total of 119 university students pronounced nonwords with these structures. The vocabulary analyses show that both the number of medial consonants and their syllabification influence vowel length. Participants were influenced by these aspects of context, some of which are not explicitly taught as a part of reading instruction. Although these results point to implicit statistical learning, participants produced fewer long vowels before single medial consonants than anticipated based on our vocabulary statistics for spelling-to-sound correspondences in disyllabic words. Participants also produced more long vowels before two identical consonant letters than anticipated given these statistics. We consider the reasons for these outcomes, and we also use the behavioral data to test two models of spelling-to-sound translation.