Regular English Pronunciation (REP) is an artificial accent
of English designed to be more logically related to English
spelling than modern naturally-occurring English accents.
The REP pronunciation of words can be generated
automatically with a set of just 200 rules and exceptions.
These rules and exceptions have been measured to provide
over 75% of standard pronunciations in running spoken
English. This paper shows that the while the intelligibility
of REP is a little worse than standard pronunciation on a
challenging intelligibility task, it is significantly easier to
comprehend than a matched control condition in which
pronunciation changes are unrelated to spelling. The paper
also shows that listeners improve in their ability to
recognise REP over a short period of exposure. The results
suggest that advocacy of regularised pronunciation has a
role to play in the reform of English spelling.
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