VISIBLE PHONEMES - OR HOW TO EXTRACT AN INVENTORY OF PHONEMES FROM A CORPUS OF SPELLING-ERRORS

The study attempts to single out the phonological inventory of a young , Danish schoolboy from his spelling errors by means of an explicit, a nalytical procedure. After a presentation of the problem, the subject, the data collection and the classification of the sound-to-letter pat terns of misspellings, i.e. the types of spelling errors found, the an alysis begins. In this the child's perceptions of his speech sounds ar e analyzed by way of letter-to-sound rules, i.e. discrimination rules or the reverse of spelling rules. When the wrong letters due to hyperc orrection are peeled off the discrimination rules the phonetic errors remain. The resulting system - the letter-to-sound relations of the ph onetic errors - appears to be a good approximation to the subject's ph onemes.