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Tools Overview

PhonoLex provides five tools for phonological analysis, word list generation, and cognitive-linguistic exploration.

Custom Word Lists

The most powerful tool in PhonoLex. Build custom word lists using:

  • Phoneme patterns: STARTS_WITH, ENDS_WITH, CONTAINS, CONTAINS_MEDIAL
  • Property filters: 35 filterable properties across 9 categories
  • Exclusions: Exclude specific phonemes
  • AND logic: Combine multiple criteria

Perfect for creating targeted word lists for therapy, research, or education.

Text Analysis

Analyze passages for readability across all property categories:

  • Aggregate percentile statistics across all properties
  • Interactive word highlighting by property with color gradients
  • Three preset phonetics passages (Grandfather, Rainbow, Caterpillar)
  • Coverage tracking and unknown word identification

Contrastive Sets

Research-based phonological intervention word lists:

  • Minimal Pairs: Traditional target/substitute contrast (e.g., /th/ vs /t/)
  • Maximal Opposition: Two unknowns with major class difference (Gierut 1989-1992)
  • Multiple Opposition: Global phoneme collapse treatment (e.g., t -> d, k, g)

Based on evidence-based clinical research by Gierut and Storkel.

Sound Similarity

Find similar words using adjustable onset/nucleus/coda weights:

  • Presets: Rhymes, alliteration, assonance, consonance, balanced
  • Custom weights: Fine-tune similarity computation
  • Threshold control: Adjust how similar words must be

Uses phoneme-sequence soft Levenshtein distance on learned feature vectors.

Lookup

Look up words and phonemes:

  • Word details: View all psycholinguistic properties with percentile ranks
  • Cognitive associations: Explore word relationships from USF, ECCC, SPP, MEN, SimLex-999, and WordSim-353
  • Phoneme features: 26 learned articulatory features
  • Phoneme comparison: Feature-by-feature comparison with similarity score
  • Feature search: Find phonemes by distinctive features