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Three experiments were undertaken to examinesecond and fifth grade Telugu-speaking children's awareness of phonological andorthographic properties of familiar Teluguwords. Experiment 1 focused on the strategies thechildren used in completing word fragments.Experiment 2 examined the children's ability tojudge and generate rhyming words, and Experiment 3examined the children's strategies incomprehending meanings of orthographicallysimilar rhyming vs. non-rhyming word pairs in asentence completion task. The results demonstrated that specific features ofsemi-syllabic alphabets such as Telugu interactwith phonological knowledge during theprocessing of meaningful words such thatchildren with more formal instruction inreading are able to access phonologicalinformation better than younger children withless well developed orthographic knowledge.Some pedagogic implications of the results arediscussed.

Lexical development is typically viewed as elaboration, differentiation, and integration of semantic codes—codes that signify the meanings embodied in the words. Our earlier work based on 50 noun + noun (NN) compounds in Telugu has shown that children in the age group 8–14 years exhibit clear-cut developmental trends in producing and segmenting the NN compound nouns and generating words that are related in meaning to the target compounds. The database for the present study is drawn from our earlier work, and it consists of 1800 words reported to be related in meaning to the 50 target compound nouns by 36 children (12 III grade children, 12 VI grade children, and 12 IX grade children) and 600 words produced by 12 adults. A thorough analysis of the individual word associations generated by the subjects revealed that children tended to generate: (1) compounds with the same head word as the target word but with a new modifier word, (2) novel compounds that have phonetic/phonological association with the target words, most of which are actually nonwords in the language; and (3) new single-stem nouns and new compounds that are considerably fewer in number than those produced by adult subjects. Some of the theoretical and pedagogical implications of the differences in performance of children vs. adult subjects in the encoding of word meanings in an experimental context are discussed in this paper.

This paper examines certain aspects of segmental and temporal coarticulation in the speech of six school-going deaf children whose native language is Telegu. Drawing on notions such as inter-gestural coordination, articulatory kinematics, phonetic sonority and vocal-tract impedance, it was hypothesised that the extent of segmental and temporal coarticultory effects in this language would depend on (l) the rhythmic status of a syllable within a word and (2) the degree of residual hearing and lip-reading skills of the subjects. The results, demonstrating that deletion of an intervening consonant in the medial position of words with geminate consonants (i.e. CVCCV words) and clusters (i.e. CVC1C2V words) contribute to prolongation of the vowel preceding the deleted consonant (resulting in CV:CV structures) and that this is particularly true in the speech of children with poor residual hearing and poor lip-reading ability, essentially supported the hypothesis. The implications of the results of this s...