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I disagree. For whatever reason, most proficient readers I know have an intuition about the correct pronunciation of a word even if they’ve never heard it spoken before. And even if they use an intuitive pronunciation that isn’t identical to standard pronunciation, they’ll still be understood.

Spelling bee is the opposite direction, going from pronunciation to spelling; not a fair comparison.

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> For whatever reason, most proficient readers I know have an intuition about the correct pronunciation of a word even if they’ve never heard it spoken before.

Because pronunciation rules exist, they're just never explicitly taught and instead learned through exposure. For example, here's someone reconstructing as many of the rules as they can: https://www.zompist.com/spell.html

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