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Phonics: A Large Phoneme-Grapheme Frequency Count Revised

Journal of Literacy Research, Spring 2004 by Fry, Edward

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The simplification process was complicated. For example, many dictionaries do not recognize a Long U: rather, a Long OO sound, as in "moon" or "rule," is specified. In the present study I have combined Hanna et al.'s categories U1 and O6. Teachers can call it Long U or Long OO, whichever suits them.

The Short U, as in "up," is also problematic. Phonetically it is similar to a schwa, as in the A in "ago." Technically a schwa must be in an unaccented syllable, but I have combined the Short U and Schwa (Hanna et al.'s categories U3 and Schwa) because for all practical purposes, and certainly for beginning readers and spellers, they sound the same.

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The letter or grapheme R and the phoneme /r/ cause a lot of vowel difficulty. When the letter A is followed by an R there are two different phonemes for the A: the phoneme /ä/ as in "far" and the phoneme /â/ as in "vary." I have chosen to keep these in two different categories.

The letter O followed by an R gives the O a broad sound /ô/ as in "for." A few other graphemes produce /â/ and Hanna et al. separate them into two categories, 02 & 05. I have consolidated them in the category Broad O.

The letter R modifies the Schwa or Short U sound when R follows an E, I, or U as in "her," "fur," "sir" to yield separate categories in the Hanna et al. study. The present study has all these uses, which is very much like the /r/ in "red," listed in the Short U + R vowel category of Table 1.

To summarize, the major changes between the classification system used in the present study and the Hanna et al. study involve consolidating U1 & O6, U3 & Schwa, and O2 & O5. These changes are reflected in Table 1.

Consonant Categories

Although consonants are far less problematic than vowels, they are not totally free of problems. Basically each consonant (grapheme) letter represents one phoneme. There are, however, some exceptions. For example, three consonant letters represent multiple phonemes: (a) Letter X as in "box" represents the /ks/ sound, (b) Letter Q (which never appears without a U) represents the /kw/ sound as in "quick," and (c) Letter C represents two sounds-the /s/ sound as in "city" and the /k/ sound as in "cat."

Consonant digraphs-CH, SH, TH voiced, as in "this," and TH voiceless, as in "thin" each represent distinct phonemes (and should have been separate letters). The consonant digraph WH represents three phonemes; /h/, /w/, and /hw/. For example, the common word "what" can be correctly pronounced as /wot/ or /hwot/, but "why" must begin with /hw/ and "who" must begin with /h/.

A few consonant phonemes are not spelled with the expected graphemes. For example.the /j/ sound is more commonly spelled with a G as in "gem" rather than the expected J as in "just." (See Table 2 for a full presentation of consonants.)

The real work of this study involved producing the tables. They simplify and summarize hundreds of pages of data from the Hanna et al. study and answer basic questions about the significance of phonics content.

Tables 1 and 2 provide all the common spellings (graphemes) for all the phonemes. The frequencies represent how often each phoneme is spelled by a particular grapheme in a 17,310-word corpus. Frequencies less than 10 are omitted; these might properly be considered exceptions as they occur less than 0.006% of the time.

Phonics: A Large Phoneme-Grapheme Frequency Count Revised

Journal of Literacy Research, Spring 2004 by Fry, Edward

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