Silex: A database for silent-letter endings in French words

Abstract

Silent-letter endings are often claimed to be a major source of inconsistency in the French orthography. In this report, we introduce Silex, a database designed to facilitate the study of spelling performance in general, and silent-letter endings in particular. It was derived from two large and recent corpora based on child- and adult-targeted material. Silex consists of three kinds of Excel workbooks: a set of Stimuli Selector workbooks that allow researchers to select words based on a variety of statistics and word characteristics; a Table Generator workbook that allows researchers to build consistency distribution tables by selecting specific phonological or orthographic units; and a Master File workbook, from which all statistics were derived, and that allows researchers to compute other statistics. Silex is different from existing databases in the manner that silent-letter endings were coded and how consistency indices were computed. Importantly, Silex provides unconditional- and conditional-consistency indices for silent-letter endings. To demonstrate the utility of Silex, we first described the silent-letter phenomenon in French. We found that, at minimum, 28 % of French words end with a silent letter. Moreover, silent-letter endings are usually t, e, s, x, or d, and the occurrence of these letters is conditioned by the phonological ending of words. Second, we showed how Silex could prove useful for the development of theoretical models and for empirical studies. The novel information provided in Silex as well as the flexibility of this database should enable researchers to advance our understanding of developing and skilled spelling performance.