Prosody Trainer

Sound & Spelling

The letter–sound map runs both ways. Read a word into its sounds by onset and rime — or take a sound and see the many ways English spells it.

Read a word — onset & rime

Or try:
Why the rime? English letter–sound mappings are inconsistent in both directions. One letter can stand for several sounds — t is /t/ in top, /ʃ/ in nation, and silent in listen — and one sound can be spelled several ways — /k/ appears as c in cat, k in king, ck in back, and ch in school. The rime unit is far steadier, so readers lean on it to pronounce new words by analogy (Treiman, Mullennix, Bijeljac-Babic, & Richmond-Welty, 1995; Ziegler & Goswami, 2005). And crucially, onset and rime are parts of the syllable, not the whole word: a word like rabbit has two onsets and two rimes (rab + bit). The evidence for this comes from word games with multisyllabic stimuli (Treiman, Fowler, Gross, Berch, & Weatherston, 1995). This prototype shows both directly: consistent rimes like -ake keep one sound across the whole family, while -ove and -ead split several ways. Pronunciations are General American (a small demo lexicon); words outside it are estimated by rime analogy and marked as such.
References

Adams, M. J. (1990). Beginning to read: Thinking and learning about print. MIT Press.

Chomsky, N., & Halle, M. (1968). The sound pattern of English. Harper & Row.

Ehri, L. C. (2005). Learning to read words: Theory, findings, and issues. Scientific Studies of Reading, 9(2), 167–188.

Fry, E. (2004). Phonics: A large phoneme–grapheme frequency count revisited. Journal of Literacy Research, 36(1), 85–98.

Fudge, E. C. (1969). Syllables. Journal of Linguistics, 5(2), 253–286.

Hanna, P. R., Hanna, J. S., Hodges, R. E., & Rudorf, E. H. (1966). Phoneme–grapheme correspondences as cues to spelling improvement. U.S. Office of Education.

Hayes, B. (1995). Metrical stress theory: Principles and case studies. University of Chicago Press.

Kahn, D. (1976). Syllable-based generalizations in English phonology (Doctoral dissertation). Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Liberman, M., & Prince, A. (1977). On stress and linguistic rhythm. Linguistic Inquiry, 8(2), 249–336.

Selkirk, E. O. (1982). The syllable. In H. van der Hulst & N. Smith (Eds.), The structure of phonological representations (Part II) (pp. 337–383). Foris.

Selkirk, E. O. (1984). Phonology and syntax: The relation between sound and structure. MIT Press.

Share, D. L. (1995). Phonological recoding and self-teaching: Sine qua non of reading acquisition. Cognition, 55(2), 151–218.

Treiman, R., Fowler, C. A., Gross, J., Berch, D., & Weatherston, S. (1995). Syllable structure or word structure? Evidence for onset and rime units with disyllabic and trisyllabic stimuli. Journal of Memory and Language, 34(1), 132–155.

Treiman, R., Mullennix, J., Bijeljac-Babic, R., & Richmond-Welty, E. D. (1995). The special role of rimes in the description, use, and acquisition of English orthography. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 124(2), 107–136.

Venezky, R. L. (1999). The American way of spelling: The structure and origins of American English orthography. Guilford Press.

Ziegler, J. C., & Goswami, U. (2005). Reading acquisition, developmental dyslexia, and skilled reading across languages: A psycholinguistic grain size theory. Psychological Bulletin, 131(1), 3–29.