<em><b>Brief Description</b><br>SynPhony</em> is the nickname for the Multilingual Synthetic
Phonics Literacy Project. The project has been formed to make available
a database of over 44,000 words analyzed into their Grapheme Phoneme
Correspondences (GPCs) for the creation of computer-based literacy
activities as well as teacher materials for language learners. The
database was compiled by Norbert Rennert, a researcher at the Canada
Institute of Linguistics. An excellent description of the background
that underpins the development of this project and its database is
available on Mr. Rennert's website, <strong>"<a href="http://call.canil.ca/english/SynPhony2.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Sounds of English</a>".</strong> <br><br>The
initial database consists of English words linked to their parts of
speech, morphology, semantic categories, age of acquisition, frequecy
of use, definitions and sentence examples, the techniques
used suit many languages other than English even better, since their
orthography is more transparent than English. There is a 10,000 word
Spanish database and a 50,000 word German database that will follow the
release of the English database. Mr. Rennert invites collaboration to
produce databases in support of other languages.<br>
<br><i><b>What We Want to Do with It</b></i><br>1. Merge images with
the database, both automatically and manually with a provided web
interface. (We will start with an automatic inclusion of images in
wikimedia commons that are already linked in entries within wiktionary
or simple.wiktionary, as well as images from the gcompris activities.)<br>
2. Supply an API for use by new and preexisting XO activities that are
literacy related, such as several of the gcompris activities, memory,
etc. Provide a transparent modification to these existing activities
so their vocabulary is broadened.<br>
3. Provide a way to define a sequence of phonemes (and other
restrictions, such as word frequency, syllable count, age of
acquisition) matching a reading curriculum. Link this curriculum
definition into the API so that activities select the words in
teacher-specified way.<br>
4. Provide a feedback mechanism to record individual student progress.<br>5. Provide a way to feed back database enhancements made by users of SynPhony in a reviewable way so they can be shared.