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.

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., 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., 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., 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.