Does English Have Useful Syllable
Division Patterns?
Devin M. Kearns
ABSTR ACT
University of Connecticut, Storrs, USA
Programs for teaching English reading, especially for students with dyslexia,
and educational practice standards often recommend instruction on dividing
polysyllabic words into syllables. Syllable division is effort intensive and could
inhibit fluency when reading in text. The division strategies might still be
useful if they work so consistently that they will help students decode most
unfamiliar polysyllabic words. No study of the English lexicon has confirmed
that the pattern is highly consistent. This study addresses this gap in the literature. The utility of the two most frequently taught patterns was examined
in a corpus analysis of 14,844 words from texts used in grades 1–8. The VC|CV
pattern involves a single vowel (V), two consonants (CC), and another vowel.
According to the expected pattern, the first vowel should have a short (lax)
sound, such as the a in rabbit. This was true of 70.6% of instances in VCCV
words in the corpus. For the V|CV pattern, the first vowel is expected have a
long (tense) sound, such as the a in mason. This was true in 30.5% of instances
in VCV words in the corpus. The patterns were more consistent for bisyllabic
words than longer words (78.8% vs. 62.5% for VCCV words and 47.3% vs. 18.8%
for VCV words, respectively). When comparing only short- and long-vowel pronunciations (ignoring other sounds such as schwa), the first vowel followed
the expected pattern in 94.3% instances of VCCV words and 53.3% of VCV
words. The unreliability of VCV may not justify the effort required to use the
strategy. There are implications for the debate about the science of reading.
R
Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1)
pp. S145–S160 | doi:10.1002/rrq.342
© 2020 International Literacy Association.
eading polysyllabic English words is important because these
words make up the majority of those encountered in text (Kearns,
Steacy, et al., 2016; Nagy & Anderson, 1984; Zeno, Ivens, Millard, &
Duvvuri, 1995) and convey important academic concepts (Bryant, Ugel,
Thompson, & Hamff, 1999). It is also difficult because polysyllabic words
have greater variability and ambiguity in the pronunciation of their graphemes (Cummins & Port, 1998; Venezky, 1999). Especially unpredictable
are the pronunciations of the single-vowel graphemes a, e, i, o, and u (and
y when representing a vowel phoneme). For example, the vowel a has a
different pronunciation in mason, mantel, and manila. Readers will constantly encounter these single vowels (occurring in over 80% of polysyllabic words) and must resolve the pronunciation ambiguities.
To address the issue of ambiguous pronunciation of single vowels,
many educators teach students special strategies for reading words that
contain single vowels. One frequently taught strategy to identify the correct pronunciation for a vowel is syllable division. The strategy is a
prominent feature of the widely used Orton–Gillingham approach
(Gillingham & Stillman, 2014) and many other programs for teaching
S145
students with dyslexia word recognition skills. Resources
for educators frequently include the recommendation
to use syllable division (Hook & Jones, 2002; KnightMcKenna, 2008; Moats, 2000; O’Connor, 2014; Toste,
Williams, & Capin, 2016; cf. Kearns & Whaley, 2019). The
strategy is contained in educational practice standards for
educators across the United States (i.e., the Common
Core State Standards; National Governors Association
Center for Best Practices & Council of Chief State School
Officials, 2010), in individual states (e.g., Texas Education
Agency, 2017), and for teaching students with dyslexia
(International Dyslexia Association, 2018).
Despite the frequent recommendation to teach students to use these patterns, there has been no study to
determine whether the recommended patterns work consistently. Nearly half a century ago, Groff (1971) suggested
that “information on phonics generalizations based on
dictionary syllabication must be gathered again” (p. 116)
to determine the value of syllable division patterns. No
such study on these patterns has been conducted even
though educators are often encouraged to teach them.
Thus, I designed this study to end that unfortunate streak.
My goal was to determine how frequently English words
follow the two most common syllable division patterns
described in these multiple sources.
nunciation of the vowel, read the syllable, and go on to
read the word. In this article, I address the two most common VC structures—VCV and VCCV (see Table 1 for a
list of all structures)—and their associated syllable division patterns, VC|CV and V|CV. When readers use the
VC|CV pattern to identify the first vowel in a VCCV
word, they divide the word between the consonants. The
first-syllable VC ends with a consonant. Readers know
that a syllable ending with a consonant is a closed syllable,
where the vowel has a lax, or short, sound (see Table 2 for
a list of the letters and sounds). For rabbit, the word is
divided into rab and bit. The rab is a closed syllable, so the
vowel a has the short sound /æ/.
When readers use the V|CV pattern to identify the
first vowel in a VCV word, they divide the word after the
first vowel. The first-syllable V ends with a vowel. Readers
know that a syllable ending with a vowel is an open syllable, where the vowel has its tense, or long, sound. For tiger,
the word is divided into ti and ger. The ti is an open syllable, so the vowel i has the long sound /ɑɪ/. See Figure 1 for
a complete description of the VCCV and VCV patterns.
(See Appendix A for extensive details about the pronunciation, history, and idiosyncrasies of syllable types and
divisions.) The VC|CV and V|CV patterns can be taught
to distinguish the pronunciations of the first vowels in
cases such as batter/hater, better/meter, dinner/diner,
collar/molar, and fussy/music.
An Explanation of Syllable
Division Patterns
Determining the Utility of Teaching
Syllable Division Patterns
Syllable division patterns address the pronunciation of a
single vowel (V) when it precedes one or more consonants (C) and another vowel, such as the a in rabbit and
the i in tiger. With the syllable division strategy, readers
can identify a word’s VC structure, divide the word using
an associated syllable division pattern, identify the pro-­­
Applying the VC|CV and V|CV patterns will produce the
correct pronunciation for the a in hatter and hater, but
this requires considerable conscious effort. An illustration
of the necessary effort comes from a wall chart that
explains the V|CV pattern in a reading program:
TABLE 1
Vowel-Consonant Structures for Va Single Vowels in the Corpus
Frequency
Percentage of Va cases
Percentage of all
cross-syllabic structuresa
tiger
6,270
48.0
24.6
VaCCVb
rabbit
4,535
34.7
17.8
V aV b
lion
1,104
8.4
4.3
VaCCCVb
wildcat
1,095
8.4
4.3
VaCCCCVb
bullfrog
64
0.5
0.3
VaCCCCCVb
offspring
1
<0.1
<0.1
Type
Example
VaCVb
Note. C = consonant; V = vowel; Va = the first vowel in a pair of vowels; Vb = the second vowel in a pair of vowels. The percentages of Va cases do
not total 100 because of rounding. For VaCVb, Va is the i in tiger or either i in citizen. These totals are for occurrences, so words with three or more
syllables could include multiple instances of single vowels. For example, respecting has two occurrences, espe and ecti, and both are counted toward
the VCCV total.
a
The percentage of all cross-syllable structures, including those without a single vowel, Va. Other types of vowels before a consonant include digraphs,
such as the ea in meadow, and r-controlled vowels, such as the or in forest.
S146 | Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1)
TABLE 2
Phonological Types of Single Vowels
Tense/long type
Lax/short type
Vowel
Phoneme
Example(s)
Phoneme
Example(s)
a
/eɪ/a or /ɑː/
mason, father
/æ/
matter
e
/iː/
helix
/ɛ/
message
i or y
/aɪ/
minus, bygone
/ɪ/
mitten, syllable
o
/oʊ/
molar
/ɑ/c
collar
u
/juː/a or /uː/
music, futon
/ʌ/,b /ʊ/
mutter, put
Note. These pronunciations are given for General American English. Tense vowels can be pronounced at the end of a word without trailing final
consonants. In the context of a spoken word, tense vowels are sometimes described as free. Lax vowels are usually followed by a consonant at the end
of a word. They may be syllable-final in a spoken polysyllabic word. In the context of a spoken word, lax vowels are sometimes described as free. This
analysis is based on 14,844 words present in The Educator’s Word Frequency Guide (Zeno et al., 1995) for grades 1–8.
a
This pronunciation of the vowel letter is conventionally described as long. b/ɑ/ is sometimes considered a tense vowel (Venezky, 1999). cThis pronunciation
of the vowel letter is conventionally described as short.
FIGURE 1
Explanation of VC|CV and V|CV Syllable Division Patterns
Note. C or cons. = consonant; optional cons. = the vowel can be preceded by a consonant, as in rabbit and tiger, but could begin with a vowel, as in
asset and ivy; V = vowel; Va = the first vowel in a pair of vowels; Vb = the second vowel in a pair of vowels. Column A describes the VC structure to
which the pattern is applied, with examples of both. It is important that Va is a single letter. The u in cougar is not an example of Va because the u is
part of the grapheme ou associated with the diphthong /æw/. Column B shows how the division pattern is applied to the VC structure. Column C shows
how the reader determines the pronunciation of the Va using knowledge of syllable types (closed or open). Column D shows the pronunciation of the
vowel for each syllable type. Column E shows how the vowel is used to pronounce the syllables in the examples.
1. Underline talking vowels and mark them with a [V].
2. Swoop between the vowels and pull down the consonants
between the vowels [marking them accordingly].
3. Cut the word according to the pattern [VC|CV, V|CV, or
one of seven others].
4. Check the position of the vowel in each syllable and mark
the vowel [with a breve (˘) for a short vowel or a macron (¯)
for a long vowel].
5. Read the word a syllable at a time and blend the syllables
together. (Greene, 2017, pp. S6–S7)
Does English Have Useful Syllable Division Patterns? | S147
This is a particularly detailed approach to syllable
division. Approaches vary in the level of detail; the
Common Core simply recommends dividing the word
before the consonant but does not provide a specific procedure. Whatever the amount of detail, all such strategies
take attention from text meaning and might decrease
­fluency enough to impair comprehension (LaBerge &
Samuels, 1974). The justification for providing instruction on a strategy that could (momentarily) impair comprehension must be that the strategy is very useful. In
other words, if syllable division patterns lead to correct
pronunciations most of the time, readers might benefit
from learning the patterns even if they reduce fluency.
Dolch (1945) suggested as much in describing ways students learned to pronounce unknown words. He argued
that syllable division rules (his term) provide students
with a tool to pronounce words until recognition of syllabic units becomes automatic. Dolch, like many others,
also thought the patterns are consistent. It is easy to see
why this is: There are many obvious examples of words
that follow the pattern. Several of the 100 most frequent
words follow the patterns, such as into and after for
VC|CV and over for V|CV.
However, violations are also easy to find. Among the
top 100 words, the o in the VCCV word only is long but
should be short, and the a in the VCV word many has a
short e but should have a long a. Further anecdotal evidence against the consistency of the patterns comes from
the fact that English speakers across the world differ in
whether they pronounce words by rule:
• The VCV word basil follows the V|CV rule in the
United States with a long a sound (rhymes with
nasal) but not in the United Kingdom, where speakers use a short a (rhymes with dazzle; Izzard, 1999).
• The VCV word process follows the V|CV rule in
Canada with a long o but not in the United States,
where speakers use a short o.
• The VCCV word zebra follows the VC|CV rule in
South Africa (rhymes with Debra) but not in the
United States (rhymes Libra; Noah, 2012).
There are also intranational differences: In the United
States, the pronunciation of the a in the V|CV ato in
potato and tomato has been apparently so contentious
that Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers could only agree to
“call the whole thing off,” apparently without resolution in
Shall We Dance (Gershwin & Gershwin, 1937). In short,
there is such great ambiguity concerning the pronunciations of vowels in VCCV and VCV words that it is reasonable to ask whether there is a useful pattern for dividing
words into syllables (see Appendix A for discussion of the
reasons for this inconsistency). In this article, then, the
question of interest is whether cases that run counter to
S148 | Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1)
the VC|CV and V|CV patterns indicate general inconsistency or whether contradictory cases are perhaps salient
but actually infrequent.
The Present Study
This study was an examination of English words commonly
encountered in texts for students in grades 1–8 and was
designed to determine how often VCV letter strings follow
the V|CV pattern and how often VCCV letter strings follow
the VC|CV pattern. Specifically, the pronunciation of the
single-vowel Va in VaCVb or VaCCVb letter strings was identified and coded whether it followed the presumed pattern
(the long sound for VCV letter strings and the short sound
for VCCV letter strings). My hypothesis was that the patterns would be highly consistent because the many recommendations to use them from many constituencies likely
reflects a kind of pattern crowdsourcing that has elucidated
a consistent feature of the English language. The alternative
hypothesis was that the putative patterns do not capture
features of the English orthographic system and that the
many recommendations to use them likely reflect an untest­ed
conventional wisdom about their utility.
Method
To determine whether English words containing single
vowels follow the VC|CV and V|CV patterns, I examined
a corpus of English words present in texts for students in
grades 1–8. I counted the occurrences of the patterns and
cataloged the different Va pronunciations for all instances
of the VaCCVb and VaCVb structures.
Data Source
The database of English words used for this analysis was
the Unisyn database (Fitt, 2001), which contains 117,625
English words and their pronunciations. The analysis
concerned only words contained in The Educator’s Word
Frequency Guide (Zeno et al., 1995) at least once in its
grades 1–8 corpus. I limited the word set to these words to
focus only on the population of words that occur in texts
for school-age readers. This decision reflected the idea
that the patterns should apply to words that beginning
readers with or without dyslexia might encounter. The
analyzed corpus contained 14,844 words.
Data Analysis
I constructed a database containing words coded in
General American English (thought to be the most widely
spoken U.S. dialect; Van Riper, 1986), which is also called
Standard American English. This article does not concern
other dialects within the United States or across the globe.
However, all dialects have the same ambiguities as General
American English, and the same long, short, and reduced
vowel categories. The phonology of the Unisyn words was
coded using an accent-free system, and a Perl script was
provided to produce the pronunciations in the General
American English accent, written in X-SAMPA (Extended
Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet). The
resulting Unisyn database contained two columns, one
with the printed word and the other with the pronunciation of that word in General American English. One
adjustment to the Unisyn coding was that the /ɑ/ and /ɔ/
were counted as the same phoneme because they are similarly articulated in General American English, which was
described earlier.
Next, I constructed a program to match the graphemes in each word with each phoneme in its pronunciation. This program operated using two data sources: One
was the Unisyn database described earlier. The other was
a master list of grapheme–phoneme correspondences
(GPCs), containing every possible GPC that might be
used to read a word, based on those (a) taught in reading
programs, (b) contained in Venezky’s (1999) comprehensive analysis of English orthography, or (c) that logically
completed a pattern. The GPC program systematically
determined the pronunciation of each letter in a given
word and created a database of GPCs for every word (see
Appendix B for further details).
I then queried the database to find instances of
VaC|CVb and VaCVb. Va had to be a single vowel (a, e, i, o,
u, or y), but Vb could have multiple letters. For both
VaCCVb and VaCVb words, those with a silent Vb (e.g.,
cake) were excluded because the VC|CV and V|CV patterns require pronounceable vowels before and after the
consonants. Words with Va followed by the consonants r
(e.g., forest), w (e.g., however), and y (e.g., foyer) were
also excluded because these trailing consonants often
form other graphemes or grapheme combinations.
The pronunciations of Va were then cataloged and
placed in one of four categories: (1) short-vowel sounds
(e.g., batter, better, bitter, potter, butter), (2) long-vowel
sounds (e.g., rater, meter, pilot, total, music), (3) reduced
vowels with the schwa /ə/ or /ɨ/, or (4) other pronunciations that did not fit the first three categories. Examples
for the letter a in each category are, respectively, (1) statue
(short), (2) mason (long), (3) adopt (reduced), and (4) any
(other). For y, /ɪ/ was coded as short, /ɑɪ/ as long, and /i/
as another vowel sound. Occurrences were calculated for
each letter string—meaning that some words were used
more than once—one for each instance of a pattern. For
example, inconsiderate contains the VCCV structures
inco and onsi, so the pronunciations of the i and o were
examined. Citizenship contains the VCV structures iti
and ize, so the pronunciation of each i was examined.
Table 3 provides examples.
The last step was to calculate the consistency of the
pattern, namely, the percentage of cases in which Va in
VaCCVb words had the short sound, and Va in VaCVb
words had the long sound. Consistency was calculated
separately for bisyllabic words and words with more syllables. My rationale for examining bisyllabic words first was
the possibility that claims about syllable division patterns
could reflect an accurate observation that the VC|CV and
V|CV patterns are consistent in bisyllabic words even if the
patterns are not as consistent in longer words. Consistency
was calculated as the percentage of words containing the
expected pattern versus all other pronunciations. For
VaC|CVb, the calculation for the consistency of the pattern
was the percentage of short-vowel pronunciations for Va as
a proportion of all pronunciations. For Va|CVb, it was the
percentage of long-vowel pronunciations as a proportion
of all pronunciations. Consistency was also calculated
TABLE 3
Categories for Syllable Division Consistency Calculations With Letter A Examples
Category
Subcategory
Bisyllabic words
Description
Example(s)
Consistency calculated for the single vowel in the first syllable
V1C|CV2
A single vowel followed by one consonant and another vowel with a
spoken pronunciation
cancel
V1|CV2
A single vowel followed by one consonant and another vowel with a
spoken pronunciation
label
Words with three or
more syllables
Consistency calculated for single vowels in words with more than two
syllables: A given single vowel could occur in any location in a word,
not just the first syllable.
VaCCVb
A single vowel followed by one consonant and another vowel with a
spoken pronunciation
cassette, fantastic
VaCVb
A single vowel followed by one consonant and another vowel with a
spoken pronunciation
basinet, abacus
Note. V1 = the first vowel in a word; V 2 = the second vowel in a word; Va = the first vowel in a pair of vowels; Vb = the second vowel in a pair of vowels.
The underlined a shows an instance of the given pattern for the letter a.
Does English Have Useful Syllable Division Patterns? | S149
when comparing the short and long pronunciations only,
ignoring reduced and other vowels. This allowed examination of the critical idea that syllable division patterns allow
readers to determine if a vowel is long or short.
Results
The results are presented in Table 4 and Figure 2.
VCCV Words
For the VC|CV pattern in bisyllabic words, Va had the
­ attern-following short sound in 78.8% of all VaCCVb
p
cases, most consistent for i (94.9%) and least consistent for
y (68.8%). Comparing only short- and long-vowel cases, Va
had the short sound in 93.5% of cases, most consistent for
u (98.5%) and least consistent for y (68.7%). In examining
words with more than two syllables, Va had the short
TABLE 4
Percentages of Pronunciations for Words With Single Va Vowels in the Corpus
Group
V1 in V1CV2 bisyllabic words
only (n = 1,381)
Va in VaCVb words with three
or more syllables (n = 3,505)
V1 in V1CCV2 bisyllabic words
only (n = 2,260)
Va in VaCCVb words with
three or more syllables
(n = 2,291)
Vowel
Short
Long
Reduced
Other
Long (vs. short)
Total cases
a
27.9
49.1
17.7
5.2
63.8
401
e
21.2
18.0
59.9
0.9
45.9
334
i
32.9
60.5
1.2
5.3
64.8
243
o
25.1
53.0
7.3
14.6
67.9
287
u
10.0
84.0
1.0
5.0
89.4
100
y
18.8
81.3
0.0
0.0
81.2
16
All
25.2
47.3
21.4
6.1
65.3
1,381
a
30.9
23.5
38.5
7.2
43.2
797
e
36.9
9.1
53.6
0.4
19.8
839
i
40.7
11.4
45.0
2.9
21.9
972
o
25.1
25.4
43.6
6.0
50.3
638
u
10.0
53.4
5.9
30.6
84.2
219
y
35.0
12.5
7.5
45.0
26.3
40
All
32.7
18.8
42.5
60.6
36.5
3,505
a
73.8
5.5
12.0
8.7
6.9
652
e
77.9
3.6
18.0
0.5
4.4
412
i
94.9
4.9
0.0
0.2
4.9
488
o
63.5
10.2
19.8
6.6
13.8
394
u
85.6
1.3
5.7
7.4
1.5
298
y
68.8
31.3
0.0
0.0
31.3
16
All
78.8
5.5
10.9
4.8
6.5
2,260
a
54.6
2.3
37.2
5.9
4.0
573
e
59.0
2.1
38.9
0.0
3.4
622
i
88.2
4.7
6.9
0.2
5.1
465
o
41.1
2.2
49.2
7.6
5.1
370
u
73.8
3.1
22.7
0.4
4.0
229
y
65.6
28.1
6.3
0.0
30.0
32
All
62.5
3.2
31.6
2.8
4.8
2,291
Note. C = consonant; V1 = the first vowel in a word; V 2 = the second vowel in a word; Va = the first vowel in a pair of vowels; Vb = the second vowel in a
pair of vowels. This analysis is based on 14,844 words present in The Educator’s Word Frequency Guide (Zeno et al., 1995) for grades 1–8. Totals do not
sum to 14,844 because the full database includes monosyllabic words and because Va cases could occur in more than one location in words with three
or more syllables (i.e., a word could contain more than one Va case).
S150 | Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1)
FIGURE 2
Proportion of Pronunciations for V1 for a, e, i, o, u, and y for (a) VCV Bisyllabic and (b) Longer VCV Words and for
(c) VCCV Bisyllabic and (d) Longer VCCV Words
(continued)
Does English Have Useful Syllable Division Patterns? | S151
FIGURE 2
Proportion of Pronunciations for V1 for a, e, i, o, u, and y for (a) VCV Bisyllabic and (b) Longer VCV Words and for
(c) VCCV Bisyllabic and (d) Longer VCCV Words (continued)
Note. C = consonant; V = vowel; V1 = the first vowel in a word; V 2 = the second vowel in a word.
S152 | Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1)
sound in 62.5% of cases overall, most consistent for i
(88.2%) and least consistent for o (41.1%). Comparing only
short- and long-vowel cases in words with more than two
syllables, Va had the short sound in 95.2% of cases, most
consistent for u (96.1%) and least consistent for y (71.8%).
VCV Words
For the V|CV pattern in bisyllabic words, Va had the
pattern-following long sound in 47.3% of cases, most
consistent for u (84.0%) and least consistent for e (18.0%).
Comparing only short- and long-vowel cases, Va had the
pattern-following long sound in 65.3% of cases, most
consistent for u (89.4%) and least consistent for e (45.9%).
For words with more than two syllables, Va had the long
sound in 32.7% of words, most consistent for u (53.4%)
and least consistent for e (9.1%). Comparing only shortand long-vowel cases, Va had the long sound in 36.5% of
cases, most consistent for u (84.2%) and least consistent
for e (19.8%).
Summary of Results
The four key findings from this analysis are these:
1. VCCV words appear to follow the VC|CV pattern
quite frequently, especially for bisyllabic words and
when ignoring reduced and other vowels.
2. Bisyllabic VCV words follow the V|CV pattern
approximately half the time but two thirds of the
time when ignoring reduced and other vowels.
3. For longer VCV words, Va has the short sound
more often than the long sound in contradiction to
the presumed pattern.
4. Unstressed vowel sounds in the Va explain much of
the low reliability of the patterns overall, especially
for words with more than two syllables and words
with the vowel e.
Discussion
Utility of Syllable Division Patterns
The results do not augur well for the idea of teaching
readers to use syllable division patterns. When reading
text, application of this effort-intensive strategy requires
a time-consuming departure from the text itself. If the
patterns were highly consistent, it would mitigate the
negative effect of the effort and time needed to apply
them. They are not consistent, so the time required does
not have a strong justification. If these patterns are so
inconsistent, why are syllable division strategies still so
widely taught?
Inferences From Exemplars
First, if one is looking for evidence, many examples fit the
pattern. The data show that the patterns work if the circumstances are right. The V|CV pattern works 84% of the
time if the reader only focuses on bisyllabic VCV words
with u. The VC|CV pattern works 98% of the time for
bisyllabic VCCV words with u. Nonexamples can be ex­­
cused as exceptions. This is reified for educators who learn
about syllable division from colleagues, authors, and reading program publishers that provide many examples illustrating the expected consistency. Another reason the pattern
makes sense is that some features of spoken English seem
to support the idea, such as the phonological constraint
that a vowel sound at the end of a word is usually long/
tense (see Appendix A for details).
The obvious problem is that the data indicate that the
exceptions to the expected V|CV pattern are more the
rule. The broader issue is that syllable division patterns are
the product of an attempt to impose order on a quasiregular orthography (Seidenberg, Cooper Borkenhagen, &
Kearns, 2020, this issue; Siegelman, Kearns, & Rueckl,
2020). English lacks the orderly grapheme–phoneme consistency of languages such as Greek. Although human
intuition is to find the signal in the noise, there is not
always adequate signal to make it useful to define and
apply a pattern. The V|CV pattern is such a case. When
the pattern works well only under very limited circumstances, the pattern adds little value in understanding the
letter–sound features of the language. In principle, this
problem can be corrected by adding a VC|V pattern
because it makes the first syllable closed and the Va short.
For example, habit is divided as hab|it with a short a in
hab. This backup strategy is a feature of several reading
programs (and mentioned in the Common Core). How­
ever, adding this alternative does not really help because it
does not get readers closer to determining the identity of
the Va. Having a second pattern is an admission that the
V|CV pattern is unreliable. The data suggest that there is
really no V|CV division pattern at all.
Help for Reading Long Words
Second, syllable division patterns are widely taught because
educators are looking for ways to help readers minimize
the complexities of reading words such as minimize and
complexities. Syllable division might provide readers with
a starting point for reading a long word without going
grapheme by grapheme or guessing. Even if the strategy
does not produce exactly the right pronunciation, readers
will no doubt be closer than by guessing based on a few
letters. This was the rationale given by Dolch (1945) for
teaching a syllable division strategy. Syllable division is
especially appealing because it seems to bring order to
Does English Have Useful Syllable Division Patterns? | S153
one of the most inconsistent aspects of English reading:
how to pronounce single vowels in polysyllabic words.
These data suggest that syllable division is the wrong
kind of help. The inconsistency of the V|CV rule is itself a
strong argument against teaching syllable division. The
level of attention and use of multiple memory systems
required to do syllable division makes the argument stronger (Martin, 2016; Sawi & Rueckl, 2019). Applying conscious attention to word recognition will likely degrade
the quality of the readers’ text representation. This may be
especially true for students with word-reading difficulty,
many of whom have comorbid executive function and
attention allocation difficulties (Kendeou, van den Broek,
Helder, & Karlsson, 2014). Any level of conscious attention will make comprehension harder, and syllable division requires readers to access procedural memory for
several steps and declarative memory for the types of patterns and definitions of syllable types (Sawi & Rueckl,
2019). The level of attention required probably rivals that
for using context for word recognition. Context-based
strategies for pronouncing words have been controversial
because some have argued that they are effortful and
unreliable (Landi, Perfetti, Bolger, Dunlap, & Foorman,
2006; Martin-Chang & Levesque, 2013; Seidenberg, 2017);
syllable division seems no better.
If these data are convincing that syllable division patterns are not a helpful characterization of polysyllabic
words in the lexicon, educators should not teach about
the patterns. However, students still need strategies to
help them read long words. The good news is that there
are other options that have been tested successfully in
experimental studies (see, e.g., Kearns & Whaley, 2019).
Educators can provide extensive practice in dividing the
words up without a rule about how to do so (Bhattacharya
& Ehri, 2004). Educators could provide some explicit
strategy information in addition to practice. One specific
strategy is to break words apart with the principle that
every syllable has at least one vowel (O’Connor, Beach,
Sanchez, Bocian, & Flynn, 2015). Another strategy is to
apply knowledge that single vowels have alternative pronunciations by trying one or the other for any single vowel.
The long and short sounds have been the focus in prior
studies (Lovett et al., 2000; Shefelbine, 1990), but students
could also learn about reduced vowels and a few frequent
other pronunciations, such as /ɑ/ for a and /i/ for i (cf.
Venezky, 1999). Teaching students to locate morphological units and use them to read words has also resulted in
success for students across the elementary and middle
school grades (see Goodwin & Ahn, 2013).
Another strategy relates to the fact that readers frequently make subtle errors when trying to sound out
unfamiliar written words. This is particularly true of
polysyllabic words, every one of which has a reduced
vowel that does not make the long or short sound. The
recoding process appears to involve a flip point where
S154 | Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1)
readers link a recoded approximation to the word in the
spoken lexicon (Kearns, Rogers, Koriakin, & Al Ghanem,
2016; Steacy et al., 2019), a semantic and phonological
ability to adjust recoding sometimes called set for variability (Gibson, 1965) or set for diversity (Venezky, 1999).
Incipient data suggest that students might benefit if they
practice correcting mispronunciations (e.g., Dyson, Best,
Solity, & Hulme, 2017; Savage, Georgiou, Parrila, & Maiorino,
2018). In this, it is especially helpful that the consonants
are far more consistent than the vowels. If readers can
identify the pronunciations of all the consonants in a
word, it is frequently quite easy to find a known word in
the phonological lexicon. For example, habit has an
ambiguous a and i but highly consistent h, b, and t. The
only relatively common English words with /h/ + some
vowel + /b/ + some vowel + /t/ are habit and hobbit, and
one is far more common than the other.
Learning to correct mispronunciations also highlights
the importance of meaning in word recognition, even when
readers are only asked to pronounce words (Harm &
Seidenberg, 2004; Kearns & Al Ghanem, 2019; Taylor, Duff,
Woollams, Monaghan, & Ricketts, 2015). The mispronunciation correction strategy only works if readers’ phonological lexicon contains an entry for the correct spoken word.
This underscores that acquisition of language and word
recognition skills have a reciprocal facilitative relation. It
also highlights the value of teaching word recognition with
proximal application to text reading. In summary, there are
various strategies for helping students read long words that
do not involve syllable division patterns. These strategies
have supporting evidence and avoid the issues of utility and
cognitive load raised by syllable division.
Syllable Division and
the Science of Reading
Whether to teach syllable division has links to the long-term
reading wars and the current debates about the science of
reading. The recent “science of reading” debate emerged
partly from the concern that many students do not receive
enough phonics instruction and that a lack of phonics is
related to the difficulties of students with dyslexia (Hanford,
2017). In the early debates, Goodman (1967) claimed that
phonics instruction was mostly unnecessary (for context,
see Castles, Rastle, & Nation, 2018), but the data favoring
phonics are simply too strong to make that claim today (e.g.,
Ehri, Nunes, Stahl, & Willows, 2001; National Reading
Panel, 2000; Stuebing, Barth, Cirino, Francis, & Fletcher,
2008; Torgerson, Brooks, & Hall, 2006).
One critical issue that spans the old and new debates
concerns the amount of phonics instruction that students
receive and, consequently, whether teaching syllable division patterns makes the cut. More than 30 years after
Goodman’s (1967) strong argument against phonics, Abbott
(2000) remarked that “from legislators to educators, the
use, nonuse, and/or misuse of generalizations continues to
be a topic of debate” (p. 233). Now, 20 more years on, there
is still debate about how much to teach about the quasiregular English orthographic system (see Paris, 2005; Phillips,
Norris, & Steffler, 2007; Rayner, Foorman, Perfetti, Peset­
sky, & Seidenberg, 2001; Seidenberg et al., 2020). This is
also part of the “science of reading” discussion. One claim
with­­in the “science of reading” oeuvre is that science favors
extensive phonics instruction. Scientific data across neuroscience, psychology, and education partly align with this.
The data strongly support the argument that readers must
acquire information about how letters and sounds connect. However, the data are not about the scope of instruction or the types of patterns to teach.
For example, an enduring scientific theory of reading
is the parallel distributed processing connectionist account
(Seidenberg & McClelland, 1989). In that model, readers’
ability to read real words and decode nonsense words
depends on knowledge that simultaneously spans all letters and links them to all possible sounds through a single
network that contains no specific letter–sound units (e.g.,
Plaut, McClelland, Seidenberg, & Patterson, 1996). Data
strongly support this account; put simply, reading skill is
very likely acquired through a network that does not
include specific letter–sound correspondences. This idea is
critical to the science of reading. By definition, this concept
does not support any claims about the types of patterns
that educators should teach nor the extent of phonics
instruction that will lead to the best reading outcomes.
Phonics instruction is doubtlessly important to allow
readers to acquire letter–sound knowledge, but the question about the extent remains important because the science of reading does not offer clarity about it. The data in
this article suggest that syllable division patterns are
beyond the limit of helpful sound–spelling patterns to
teach. Yet, where should the limit be set? There are no
data to guide the decision about where to stop teaching
GPCs (or other such units). One implication from this
study is that examining the lexicon can be helpful. These
data shed light on why it is problematic to try to impose
order on the language in places where it does not have
especially orderly characteristics. Further examination of
the letter–sound relations in the lexicon can lead to better
decisions about what to teach and when.
Limitations
My goal in this study was to determine whether syllable
division patterns can be used to eliminate the ambiguity
in the pronunciation of single vowel letters in polysyllabic
words. An important limitation is that VCV and VCCV
structures do not comprise the universe of cross-syllabic
structures that readers encounter. Table 1 shows that the
included patterns comprise 42.4% of all cross-syllable
contexts. However, VCV and VCCV structures comprise
a large majority of cases (82.7%) when considering only
single vowel letters, so these data cover a large orthographic domain.
Another limitation is that the analyses do not consider other systematic features of the language that affect
pronunciation. For example, a is pronounced as /ɑ/ when
preceded by w in most cases, but cases where the Va a is
pronounced as /ɑ/ are treated as other pronunciations
rather than long or short. Another example concerns the
-ic ending. In the 650 words with a VaCic pattern, the Va
has a short sound in 607 of them (93.4%).1 English has
other pockets of consistency that I did not consider in this
study given my analytic approach. Whether these other
consistencies would be worth teaching is another topic
for a subsequent study, an important extension of this
work and of Vousden, Ellefson, Solity, and Chater’s (2011).
This speaks to a broader limitation that the program’s
search mechanism involved only left-to-right matching. If
the searches had been done differently, the set of letter–
sound matches identified for each word might have been
different and possibly impacted the consistency calculations but would not likely have led to a dramatic change
in the findings. I argue that these limitations do not obviate the value of this study as a helpful step in addressing
Groff ’s (1971) concern that the evidence about the utility
of syllable division patterns has not been collected.
A final obvious but important limitation is that this article does not include data about students’ reading. It is unclear
whether students might develop sensitivity to the contexts in
which syllable division patterns apply even if only somewhat
consistently. In a connectionist account, readers will develop
tacit knowledge about any features of words that increase
reading accuracy, so patterns with even limited consistency
are likely to be learned. This learning occurs even if readers
are not consciously aware of the pattern, so this is still not an
argument for teaching syllable division. However, it suggests
that reading performance might be enhanced by teaching
reading using words that contain some context-dependent
consistencies in the V|CV and VC|CV patterns. That possibility cannot be addressed with these data because they do
not involve examination of readers’ performance.
Conclusion
English is an alphabetic language in which print is a cipher
for speech (Gough, Juel, & Griffith, 1992), and readers
must acquire the ability to connect letters with sounds, a
skill that requires some form of systematic phonics instruction for students’ reading success. Helping students acquire
this skill is particularly challenging for polysyllabic words
because they frequently contain single vowels that have
ambiguous pronunciations. Syllable division strategies are
designed to help, predicated on the idea that English has
consistent syllable division patterns. The data in this study
suggest that the consistency is overestimated and that the
Does English Have Useful Syllable Division Patterns? | S155
patterns’ low consistency militates against the idea of
teaching this effortful strategy for identifying vowel pronunciations. Moreover, there are empirically supported
instructional alternatives to teaching these patterns, with
evidence of improving student outcomes.
However, a challenge to moving education in this
direction is that instruction on syllable division patterns
has a long history as a strategy for helping students with
dyslexia, and many educators consider it very important.
Many of the same educators and associated researchers
think it fits with a broader focus on systematic phonics
instruction related to the science of reading. The science of
reading does not address and cannot support many claims
about what to teach, including syllable division. This point
should not be construed as an argument against teaching
phonics, but I suggest that the field should collectively discuss and conduct further research on the extent (how many
and which units should be taught) and manner (how patterns are described and practiced) of instruction. The “science of reading” debate might provide an opportunity to
have that discussion if all stakeholders are willing to entertain changes to their thinking.2
Whatever the outcome of that ongoing discussion, I
hope these data can have an impact on instruction, that
this examination of the lexicon will lead researchers to
endorse and educators to use polysyllabic word-reading
strategies that do not involve syllable division. In addition,
I hope this exploration of the orthographic and phonological
characteristics of the language, in the tradition of the pioneering work of Vousden et al. (2011) and others, will result
in more studies to identify features of the English language
that may be used to improve reading instruction.
NOTES
his example is credited to an anonymous reviewer of an earlier draft
T
of this article with appreciation.
2
As a teacher of students with dyslexia, I taught syllable division. As a
teacher educator, I recommended this instruction to others. I found
many exceptions to the patterns, and I began to question whether the
patterns really worked. As a researcher, I used a scientific approach to
answer that question and write this article. I entertained changes to my
original thinking, and the data changed my views. I provide this personal example to illustrate my own commitment to do what I am recommending to others.
3
In linguistic terms, four of the five long-vowel sounds (i.e., /i/ is probably not one) are diphthongs, or two vowel sounds pronounced within
the same syllable. In education, these diphthongs are typically regarded
as single sounds and are distinguished from short vowels because these
long vowels represent the names of the letters (except y).
4
Free vowels can occur before a consonant in monosyllabic words but
are usually represented by a digraph (e.g., ai in main, ea in meat, oa in
moat) or with a trailing silent e marker.
1
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Submitted November 2, 2017
Final revision received June 17, 2020
Accepted June 23, 2020
DEVIN M. KEARNS is an associate professor in the Department of
Educational Psychology and a research scientist in the Center for
Behavioral Education and Research at the University of Connecticut,
Storrs, and a research scientist for Haskins Laboratories, New
Haven, Connecticut, USA; email devin.kearns@uconn.edu. He
researches reading disability and focuses on designing and testing
reading interventions and studying how educational practice,
cognitive science, and neuroscience can be linked.
APPE NDI X A
A Detailed Explanation of Syllable
Division Patterns
The idea of syllable division has its origin in English phonology, in which vowel length often determines whether a
vowel phoneme can occur at the end of a monosyllabic
word. Shortened (lax) vowels do not occur at the end of a
spoken word. They are almost always followed by a consonant, making them checked vowels. Longer (tense) vowels
can occur at the ends of spoken words and are called free
vowels in that context (Akmajian, Demers, Farmer, &
Harnish, 2001). These vowel length differences have led to
the use of the term short for the checked vowels and long
for the free vowels,3 a shorthand that remains a part of elementary school reading instruction (see Table 2 for a list of
these vowels).
The short- and long-vowel phonemes are paired with
one of the six single-vowel letters,(a, e, i, o, u, or y). Each
vowel can refer to a long or short sound. In polysyllabic
words, a vowel can also represent the reduced vowel phoneme /ə/ (schwa). For example, a is pronounced differently in mason, master, and manila, reflecting the possibility
that the vowel could be pronounced /ei/, /æ/, or /ə/,
respectively.
When readers encounter unfamiliar words with single vowels, the words always have multiple possible pronunciations, so readers must rely on other information.
For monosyllabic words, pronunciations are somewhat
predictable because the vowels generally reflect what is
possible in phonology. Short-vowel sounds are checked
and do not occur at the ends of words, so a single vowel
in the middle of a monosyllabic word is likely to make a
S158 | Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1)
short sound.4 Long vowel sounds are free and can occur
at the ends of words, so a single vowel at the end of a
monosyllabic word is likely to make a long sound. This
allows readers to pronounce nonwords, such as spron
and spro, unambiguously.
For polysyllabic words, the checked/free phonotactic constraint still applies and extends from words to
syllables, including nonfinal ones (e.g., both e and o in
hello and veto). Syllables are given names that reflect the
checked/free distinction. Those with a checked vowel
are called closed syllables, and those with a free vowel
are called open syllables. This distinction appears to be
reflected in the English orthography in that vowels in
closed syllables appear to be followed by two consonant
letters (e.g., the underlined letters in anvil, enter, midway,
cotton, and hundred), and vowels in open syllables seem
to be followed by one consonant letter (e.g., the underlined letters in major, meter, minor, motion, and music).
These patterns relate to the concept of syllable division patterns. In some cases, it appears that the number of
consonants following a vowel indicates its checked or free
status (and thus long or short pronunciation; i.e., two consonants = closed; one consonant = open). This leads to the
idea that the number of consonant letters after a vowel
indicates whether the vowel is long or short. If there are
two consonant letters between the vowels (VCCV), the
first vowel likely has a short sound. As illustrated in this
article, that belief is generally well founded (although
complicated by vowel reduction). This has its origins in
Middle English, a scribal spelling convention of doubling
consonants following a short vowel to identify its sound
(Venezky, 1999). The other idea is that a VCV structure
has a division after the first consonant (V|CV), making
the first syllable open and the vowel long. However, the
data presented here also indicate that the VCV structure
follows the expected pattern with little consistency. Some
aspects of this ambiguity are explainable.
Reasons for the Idiosyncratic
Nature of the V|CV Pattern
English has an Anglo-Saxon core vocabulary but has also
borrowed word spellings from languages such as French
(e.g., baton) and idiosyncratically transliterated other foreign words (e.g., canoe, the French manere was adjusted
to manner). English also has some seemingly arbitrary
conventions with obscure historical roots that affect the
reliability; for example, the letter v is almost never doubled, as in cavern (McArthur, 2003), except in abbreviated
words such as divvy (from dividend in the late 19th century; “Divvy,” 2015) and revving (from revolution in the
early 20th century; “Rev,” 2015). The result is that many
words do not seem to follow the V|CV pattern.
Part of the challenge is that phonotactics allow short
vowels to occur at the end of a spoken nonfinal syllable.
In speech, English follows CV phonology, meaning that
consonant phonemes are stacked at the beginning of syllables (e.g., cr in decree, /dɨ ˈkɹi/), as long as phonotactic
constraints permit it (e.g., /n/ and /v/ in anvil cannot be
in the same syllable; Clements & Keyser, 1983; Perry,
Ziegler, & Zorzi, 2010). For abacus, the spoken syllables
are segmented as /ˈæ bə kəs/, with a short vowel in the
first syllable and two reduced vowels after it. Using the
orthographic V|CV pattern, the division a|ba|cus should
result in long-vowel pronunciations for each a. This
would produce /eɪ beɪ kʌs/, eigh-bay-kus, which little resembles the intended pronunciation.
The abacus example also highlights a second issue,
vowel reduction. English is a stressed-timed language,
meaning that polysyllabic words contain syllables shortened temporally by reducing one or more of its vowels.
For example, if lapel is divided using the V|CV pattern,
the word would be /ˈleɪ pəl/, laypul, but the first syllable
is reduced, /lə ˈpɛl/. English words are thought to have a
tendency toward trochaic stress (i.e., stress on the first
syllable; Rastle & Coltheart, 2000; Ševa, Monaghan, &
Arciuli, 2009), but lapel types of examples do not appear
to be rare (e.g., about, banana, repeat).
APPE NDI X B
Description of the
Word-Decoding Program
The program operated by trying every GPC in the master
list against every letter and sound in each word. For
example, for the word get, coded /gEt/ in X-SAMPA, the
program would examine the letters, moving from left to
right, so g first. Then, the program would try to find a
GPC that contains a g letter and try to locate one that contains one of the sounds in /gEt/. The program would
locate g = /g/ and code those together. This process was
repeated for the remaining letters. The program was
designed to do this for GPCs with multiple letters (e.g.,
tch = /C/) and multiple phonemes (e.g., x = /ks/). The
program decoded all 117,625 words in the Unisyn database, including the 14,844 words in this study.
To check the accuracy of the program’s output, subsets of 200 words were selected at random to check for accuracy and determine whether the database contains GPC
errors. Some of these checks led to changes in the GPC
system, the coding process, or both. One change to the
program concerned empty letters, those that did not represent a phoneme (e.g., e = // in gauze). The program
would overuse these when a word contains complex
GPCs, so a process was included to inhibit the use of empty letters. Words were given a score for every empty letter
that they contain, and the program would attempt to decode the word a different way when this score was greater
than zero. After development and subset analyses were
completed, a research associate with a master’s d
­ egree in
linguistics checked more subsets and made f­urther corrections. By the end, every subset contained fewer than
one error per 100 words, and we stopped conducting
checks. A few additional errors were encountered during
data analysis and were corrected at that time. In total, there
were fewer than 300 corrections to individual words.
Example of Matching Letters
and Sounds for Get
The Unisyn database contains words (N = 14,844) and
their pronunciations coded in X-SAMPA. Each wordi
contains lettersim and phonemesik where m and k are ≥1i.
The GPC database contains GPCs. Each GPCa has one
graphemea and all phonemes1 that are possible pronunciations of grapheme a where x ≥ 1, because graphemes can
be associated with multiple phonemes.
Does English Have Useful Syllable Division Patterns? | S159
The program evaluates each word i and iterates over
graphemes 1–A in the GPC database to identify which
GPC a matches the leftmost letter(s) in word i. Within
grapheme set a, the program searches GPCs with the
most letters first. When grapheme a matches the leftmost letters in word i, the program examines the leftmost phoneme in word i, iterates over the phonemes 1–x
for grapheme a in the GPC database, and tests whether a
given phoneme x occurs in wordi. If phoneme x matches
the leftmost phonemek in word i, this is identified as a
match. When a match is found, it is identified as GPCim
in word i. The program iterates over word i until all of
its letters and phonemes have been matched to graphemes and phonemes in the GPC database and creates
the set of GPCs ij for that word. Figure B1 provides an
example.
FIGURE B1
Example of the Operation of the Grapheme–Phoneme Correspondences (GPC) Program for the Word Get Found in
the Unisyn Database
Note. The first letter, g, is located in the GPC database (➊). That database includes three phonemes for g: /ʤ/ in gem, /g/ in get, and /ʒ/ in genre,
coded as dZ, g, and Z, respectively, in X-SAMPA. The program iterates over these phonemes. It begins with dZ (➋) and searches for dZ in the phonemes
for get in the Unisyn database (➌). The code dZ is not present, so the program tries the phoneme g from the GPC database (➍). A match is found (➎),
so the GPC match g = /g/ is then added to the output GPC database for the entry get. Having created a GPC for g, the program then iterates over e
and t.
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