The pronunciation of unfamiliar native and non-native town names.
Abstract
This paper will discuss pronunciations of unfamiliar
names, both British and foreign, by native speakers
of English. Most studies which look at peoples'
pronunciations of unfamiliar or pseudowords are
based on English word-patterns, rather than a crosslanguage
selection, while algorithms for determining
the pronunciation of names from a variety of
languages do not necessarily tell us how real people
behave in such a situation. This paper shows that
subjects may use different systems or sub-systems of
rules to pronounce unknown names which they
perceive to be non-native. If we wish to model
human behaviour in novel word pronunciation, we
need to take into account the fact that, while native
speakers are not experts in all foreign languages,
neither are they linguistically naive.