OT Does sounding it out really work?

Question

OT but at least it's about home lifeDidn't we recently discuss here phonetics and whole word etc? Learningto read. Does sounding it out really work? I forgot this story. We used to live across the street from a golf course, and my motherwould find 30 or 40 golfballs a year in our yard.   Every few years shewould take 100 or more to a golf driving range and sell them. And they had different brand names and the one that got me wasTit-Leist.A strange name, I though.  Never heard it mentioned in commercials etc. Took years to realize it was Title-ist.

Dean Hoffman · Accepted Answer

It apparently works better than the alternatives that have been tried. We grew up during the 60s more or less which makes a big difference. My 3rd and 6th grade teacher was the same grouchy old lady. There was no doubt about who was in charge of HER classroom. It was a public school. English is a mess to learn. There, their, and they're all sound the same.

rbowman · Answer

I've done some work with Soundex. It originated with the Census department as a way to compare surnames with various spellings and has been tweaked over the years. The algorithm is relatively simple and encodes a word into

4 characters like T217.

The use case is to aid a dispatcher who is trying to enter a s[poken address. Sometimes it helps but it can also return an incomprehensible set of suggestions if you don't understand how it works.

Hey word spotting is another problem area. Saying 'alexa' wakes the device up and after the device is triggered the rest of the speech processing is done in the cloud. 'alexa' doesn't have a lot, if any, homophones. You certainly wouldn't want to use 'there' as a keyword.

OT Does sounding it out really work?

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