An Analysis of the Phonetic Elements in a Basal Reading Vocabulary

Abstract

The first of the needed scientific investigations in the field of phonetics, as summarized in Part I of the Twenty-fourth Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, is comprehensive study of the frequency of occurrence of all important phonetic elements and of the various combinations in which they occur, based on a word list which shows the frequency of the words in common use in primary-reading materials.' Since the writer has been engaged for some months in a study which meets this need at least in part, it seems wise to publish at this time the results thus far obtained. The purpose of the study was twofold: (i) To compare the letter symbols occurring in a basal reading vocabulary with the ideal standard of a phonetically perfect language, in which each written symbol would have but one possible sound or pronunciation and each distinct sound would be represented by but one written symbol. It is a well-known fact that the English language is not thus phonetically perfect, but just how closely it approaches the standard or how widely it departs from it has never been accurately determined. (2) To find out which of these letter symbols are of fairly constant pronunciation and of sufficiently frequent occurrence to make the establishing of a bond between the symbol and the sound a possible aid to a child who is learning to read. Thorndike's list of the words most commonly used in reading2 was taken as the basis of all the work, not because this list is regarded as perfect but merely because it is the best list available at the present time. In two respects it is ill adapted to research in primary reading: (i) It was not compiled exclusively from children's litera-