‘an optimal orthography would have one representation for each lexical entry’

‘the fundamental principle of orthography .. that phonetic variation is not indicated where it is predictable by a general rule’

‘conventional orthography is ... a near optimal system for the lexical representation of English words’.

‘In short conventional orthography is much closer than one might guess to an optimal orthography, an orthography that presents no redundant information and that indicates directly by direct letter-to-segment correspondence, the underlying lexical form of the spoken language’

‘What the foreigner lacks is just what the child already possesses, a knowledge of the phonological rules of English that relate underlying representations to sounds.’

/ei/ vs /¾ / nation, national, nationalist, nationalistic, nationality, ...
nature, natural, naturist
/i:/ vs /e/ extreme/extremity
/k/ vs /s/ medicate, medicine
critic, criticise
/g/ vs /d½ / sagacity, sage
prodigal, prodigious
/‘ u/ vs /‰ / photograph, photographer
/a:/ vs /¾ / vs /‘ / telegraph, telegraphic, telegraphy

present tense "-s" likes /s/, plays /z/
past tense "-ed" liked /t/, played /d/

/g/ sign, signature, assignation, resignation, ...
/b/ bomb, bombardier, bombastic?, bombazine?, ...

Yule, V. (1991), Orthographic Factors in Reading: Spelling and Society, Ph.D., Monash (in Essex Library PE 1150.Y8)

i) Related words should retain their visual similarity
ii) Inflections should have a stable representation
iii) Vowels in unstressed syllables should retain the spellings of the stressed vowels in
related words (as if in formal speech)
iv) Regular vowel alternations in stressed syllables should retain their single vowel
spelling (e.g. sane/sanity)
v) The question of representing irregular stress should be taken seriously

(based on a sample of derived morphemes from the spelling list issued by the Victorial Education Dept, Australia)

‘under 6% of irregular spellings ... could be attributed to Chomskyan representation of underlying lexical structure that overrode pronunciation changes’

Table 1 Phonological changes unaccompanied by changes in orthographic representation, as predicted by rules such as Chomsky's generative spelling (inflections and changes in stress are disregarded)

drank/drink/drunk/draught

language/linguistic/lingual

/d/            /t/           /id/ VC
bird          belt         talented

/d/           /t/          /id/        <d>=/d/ /t/ after <e>
called     dressed     waited       used

/d/       /t/         V change     no change VC
found    felt          ran                hit

ortho <gh>   doubling    addition of <t> VC
bought           rubbed          bent

Result of L2 experiment with 65 Ss misc L1s

Note: Treiman (1997) says greater use of <t> for flapped /d/ in <dirty> and /d/ for flapped /d/ in <duty> shows morphological knowledge; also preservation of <t> in <waited> (flapped) as opposed to <wait> non-flap.