The Influence of Regional Pronunciation Variation on Children’s Spelling and the Potential Benefits of Accent Adapted Spellcheckers

Proceedings of the 25th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL), pages 674–683 November 10–11, 2021. ©2021 Association for Computational Linguistics 674 The Influence of Regional Pronunciation Variation on Children’s Spelling and the Potential Benefits of Accent Adapted Spellcheckers Emma O’Neill ADAPT Centre University College Dublin emma.l.oneill@ucdconnect.ie Joe Kenny Zeeko Ireland joe@zeeko.ie Anthony Ventresque Lero Research Centre University College Dublin anthony.ventresque@ucd.ie Julie Carson-Berndsen ADAPT Centre University College Dublin julie.berndsen@ucd.ie Abstract A child who is unfamiliar with the correct spelling of a word often employs a “sound it out” approach: breaking the word down into its constituent sounds and then choosing letters to represent the identified sounds. This often results in a misspelling that is orthographically very different to the intended target. Recently, efforts have been made to develop phonetic based spellcheckers to tackle the more deviant nature of children’s misspellings. However, lit- tle work has been done to investigate the po- tential of spelling correction tools that incorpo- rate regional pronunciation variation. If a child must first identify the sounds that make up a word, it stands to reason their pronunciation would influence this process. We investigate this hypothesis along with the feasibility and potential benefits of adapting spelling correc- tion tools to more specific language variants - particularly Irish Accented English. We use misspelling data from schoolchildren across Ireland to adapt an existing English phonetic- based spellchecker and demonstrate improve- ments in performance. These results not only prompt consideration of language varieties in the development of spellcheckers but also con- tribute to existing literature on the role of re- gional accent in the acquisition of writing pro- ficiency. 1 Introduction Children’s spelling has long been considered to be rooted in phonetics; being influenced by pronun- ciation and speech sound similarity (Read, 2018). Misspellings are often ‘creative’ in that they reflect the phonetic judgements of the child and stem from their efforts to use letters to represent the sounds of their spoken language. As such, these misspellings are often unique and can deviate heavily from the correct spelling making the automatic correction of such errors a non-trivial task. Nowadays, a popular focus in early literacy ed- ucation is the teaching of phonics with schools across the English speaking world incorporating the method into their curricula (National Council of Curriculum and Assessment, 2019; Bowers and Bowers, 2017). Phonics based approaches to read- ing and writing involve teaching the relationship between letters and sounds. For example, the word ‘cat’ would be broken down into the letters ‘c’, ‘a’, ‘t’ and the corresponding phonemes /K/, /AE/, /T/ 1. When tackling the spelling of an unfamiliar word, children are then encouraged to adopt a “sound it out” approach by identifying the phonetic sequence of the word and the letters which represent these sounds. This approach is heavily relied upon by low achieving spellers (Daffern and Critten, 2019). Despite the phonetic nature of children’s spelling and the employment of a literacy education method- ology that is intrinsically linked to spoken words, little work has been …

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