Search

Possible age-related differences in Phonemic Fluency Test (PFT) and Semantic Fluency Test (SFT) performance were examined by using longitudinal data of healthy older adults. The performance trajectories of 81 older adults in the 2 tests were analyzed for 11 years, from 65 to 75 years of age, via individually calculated linear regression coefficients. The results indicated that the PFT and SFT performance showed an age-related decline. However, the declining slope of the SFT was steeper than that of the PFT performance. These findings correspond with those of previous cross-sectional studies and suggest a future need to examine neurobiological substrates underlying the two domains of verbal fluency abilities. KEYWORDS: aging, developmental change, longitudinal study, Phonemic Fluency Test, Semantic Fluency Test, Tests of verbal fluency tasks (VFTs) are included in nearly all neuropsychological test batteries for evaluating cognitive impairments after brain damage or diseases affecting the central nervous system. The VFT [...]

A pesar de la amplitud y solidez de los conocimientos que a día de hoy validan las reglas de pronunciación que rigen la interpretación fonémica de las palabras inglesas, dichas reglas no son generalmente enseñadas en el ámbito del inglés para extranjeros, en ningún nivel. Dado que una posible razón de esta ausencia radica en la complejidad del sistema ortográfico inglés, en el presente estudio presentamos una conveniente simplificación en forma de diez reglas básicas para la interpretación de grafemas vocálicos en sílaba acentuada. Estas reglas se enmarcan dentro de un tejido conceptual sensible a distinciones entre palabras agudas, llanas y esdrújulas, así como a distinciones con respecto al carácter genérico/específico, post-nuclear/pre-nuclear y adyacente/distante de los indicadores grafo-fonémicos. Con ello pretendemos generar el tipo de conocimientos que pueda ser de utilidad en el contexto ILE. La fiabilidad de estas reglas se ha puesto a prueba en una lista de 5.000 palabras frecuentes del inglés. De este modo se derivan nociones con respecto a qué resulta oportuno enseñar, y en qué orden. El estudio incluye abundantes resultados que podrán ser libremente explorados por los profesores de inglés.Palabras clave: ortografía inglesa; pronunciación inglesa; método phonics; grafo-fonémica; lectura; enseñanza del inglés como lengua extranjeraDespite the existence of a vast and solid heritage supporting their validity and reliability, pronunciation rules that assist the phonemic interpretation of graphemic structures are not usually taught in the EFL classroom at any level. Since a likely reason for this absence might lie in the intrinsic complexity of the English writing system, a convenient reduction is presented in the form of ten basic rules for the interpretation of vocalic graphemes in stressed syllable. These rules are understood within an EFL oriented conceptual frame that introduces distinctions between oxytone, paroxytone and proparoxytone structures, as well as systemic/specific, post-nuclear/pre-nuclear and adjacent/distant grapho-phonemic contexts. With this approach, I attempt to generate the kind of grapho-phonemic knowledge that might be useful within the EFL context. The reliability and representativity of these rules have been tested against a wordlist of 5,000 frequent English words. Notions of what to teach and in what order can be derived from the findings. A rich array of results is presented that might be further explored and discussed by EFL instructors.Keywords: English orthography; English pronunciation; phonics; grapho-phonemics; reading; EFL teaching, EFL Grapho-Phonemics: The 'Teachability' of Stressed Vowel Pronunciation Rules1. IntroductionAny EFL teaching method that at some point relies on the written word very soon has to face the challenges posed [...]

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to further explore the understanding of speaker-specific realizations of the /s/-/∫] contrast in German in relation to individual differences in palate shape. Method: Two articulatory experiments were carried out with German native speakers. In the first experiment, 4 monozygotic and 2 dizygotic twin pairs were recorded by means of electromagnetic articulography. In the second experiment, 12 unrelated speakers were recorded by means of electropalatography. Interspeaker variability in the articulatory distance between the sibilants was measured and was correlated with several parameters of the palate shape. Results: The results were twofold: (a) Similar palatal morphologies as found in monozygotic twins yield similar articulatory realizations of the /s/-/∫] contrast regarding vertical and horizontal distance of the target tongue tip positions, and (b) the realization of the contrast was influenced by palatal steepness, especially the inclination angle of the alveolo-palatal region. Speakers with flat inclination angles mainly retracted their tongue to realize the contrast, whereas speakers with steep inclination angles also elevated their tongue. Conclusion: The articulatory realization of the sibilant contrast is influenced not only by speaker-specific auditory acuity, as previously observed, but also by palatal shape morphology, which affects the somatosensory feedback speakers receive. Key Words: phonemic contrast, sibilant, interspeaker variability, palate shape, twins, In this work, we investigated interspeaker variability in speech production. The factors involved in interspeaker variability are manifold. Ladefoged and Broadbent (1957, p. 98) grouped them into 'idiosyncratic features of [...]

Purpose: Auditory perception of vowels in background noise is enhanced when combined with visually perceived speech features. The objective of this study was to investigate whether the influence of visual cues on vowel perception extends to incongruent vowels, in a manner similar to the McGurk effect observed with consonants. Method: Identification of Dutch front vowels /i, y, e, Y/ that share all features other than height and lip-rounding was measured for congruent and incongruent audiovisual conditions. The audio channel was systematically degraded by adding noise, increasing the reliance on visual cues. Results: The height feature was more robustly carried over through the auditory channel and the lip-rounding feature through the visual channel. Hence, congruent audiovisual presentation enhanced identification, while incongruent presentation led to perceptual fusions and thus decreased identification. Conclusions: Visual cues influence the identification of congruent as well as incongruent audiovisual vowels. Incongruent visual information results in perceptual fusions, demonstrating that the McGurk effect can be instigated by long phonemes such as vowels. This result extends to the incongruent presentation of the visually less reliably perceived height. The findings stress the importance of audiovisual congruency in communication devices, such as cochlear implants and videoconferencing tools, where the auditory signal could be degraded. Key Words: audiovisual speech perception, vowels, McGurk effect, Perception of spoken language is not an auditory phenomenon only; it is also heavily influenced by visually perceived pronunciation information. The influence of visual cues on speech perception has been [...]

This study investigated the use of novel discrimination and segmentation procedures for evaluating the phonemic awareness of young children. Digitally-recorded speech stimuli were presented to a sample of 40 children ranging in age from 50 to 83 months. The participant sample was divided into a younger and an older group. The results of an analysis of variance indicated that the difference between the younger and older groups of children was significant; but, the difference between the discrimination and segmentation tasks was not. Considerable variation was observed among participants, with general tendencies for the older children to perform better than the younger children and for children performing well on one task to perform well on the other and vice versa. The educational implications of the findings from this study are discussed with reference to assessment procedures designed to identify children likely to be at risk for delays in the development of early literacy skills., Proficient reading depends upon efficient, effortless, and automatic word recognition. The foundation for word recognition and reading development in general is based on knowledge of orthographic symbols (letters of the [...]

Purpose: Preschool children often have difficulties in word classification, despite good speech perception and production. Some researchers suggest that they represent words using phonetic features rather than phonemes. In this study, the authors examined whether there is a progression from feature-based to phoneme-based processing across age groups and whether responses are consistent across tasks and stimuli. Method: In Study 1, 120 three- to five-year-old children completed 3 tasks assessing use of phonetic features in classification, with an additional 58 older children completing 1 of the 3 tasks. In Study 2, all of the children, together with an additional adult sample, completed a nonword learning task. Results: In all 4 tasks, children classified words sharing phonemes as similar. In addition, children regarded words as similar if they shared manner of articulation, particularly word finally. Adults also showed this sensitivity to manner, but across the tasks, there was a pattern of increasing use of phonemic information with age. Conclusions: Children tend to classify words as similar if they share phonemes or if they share manner of articulation word finally. Use of phonemic information becomes more common with age., There is a body of evidence that children tend to classify words sharing phonetic features as similar (Snowling, Hulme, Smith, & Thomas, 1994). Some researchers argue that this reflects a [...]

Abstract The phoneme detection task is widely used in spoken-word recognition research. Alphabetically literate participants, however, are more used to explicit representations of letters than of phonemes. The present study [...]

Purpose: Previous research has found that auditory training helps native English speakers to perceive phonemic vowel length contrasts in Japanese, but their performance did not reach native levels after training. Given that multimodal information, such as lip movement and hand gesture, influences many aspects of native language processing, the authors examined whether multimodal input helps to improve native English speakers' ability to perceive Japanese vowel length contrasts. Method: Sixty native English speakers participated in 1 of 4 types of training: (a) audio-only; (b) audio-mouth; (c) audio-hands; and (d) audio-mouth-hands. Before and after training, participants were given phoneme perception tests that measured their ability to identify short and long vowels in Japanese (e.g., /kato/ vs. /kato:/). Results: Although all 4 groups improved from pre- to posttest (replicating previous research), the participants in the audio-mouth condition improved more than those in the audio-only condition, whereas the 2 conditions involving hand gestures did not. Conclusions: Seeing lip movements during training significantly helps learners to perceive difficult second-language phonemic contrasts, but seeing hand gestures does not. The authors discuss possible benefits and limitations of using multimodal information in second-language phoneme learning. KEY WORDS: lips, mouth, hand gesture, auditory learning, phonemic contrasts, second language, Foreign languages pose many challenges for learners. But learning to hear distinctions among novel speech sounds stands out as a particularly difficult obstacle. In the present study, we investigated whether [...]

Japanese has a vowel duration contrast as one component of its language-specific phonemic repertory to distinguish word meanings. It is not clear, however, how a sensitivity to vowel duration can develop in a linguistic context. In the present study, using the visual habituation-dishabituation method, the authors evaluated infants' abilities to discriminate Japanese long and short vowels embedded in two-syllable words (/mana/ vs. /ma:na/). The results revealed that 4-month-old Japanese infants (n = 32) failed to discriminate the contrast (p = .676), whereas 9.5-month-olds (n = 33) showed the discrimination ability (p = .014). The 7.5-month-olds did not show positive evidence to discriminate the contrast either when the edited stimuli were used (n = 33; p = .275) or when naturally uttered stimuli were used (n = 33; p = . 189). By contrast, the 4-month-olds (n = 24) showed sensitivity to a vowel quality change (/mana/ vs. /mina/; p = .034). These results indicate that Japanese infants acquire sensitivity to long-short vowel contrasts between 7.5 and 9.5 months of age and that the developmental course of the phonemic category by the durational changes is different from that by the quality change. Keywords: speech perception, long and short vowels, language development, visual habituation dishabituation method DOI: 10.1037/a0016718

Byline: Regina Morin Abstract Much research establishing phonemic bases for grammatical gender assignment in Spanish nouns relies on straightforward word counts, some of them rather small, and does not examine the characteristics of individual words. No distinction is made between native Spanish words and loanwords, or between terminal letter, terminal phoneme, and terminal morpheme. As a result, some useful generalizations are lost, and others, less useful, have been accepted as true and repeated over and over. When large amounts of data are examined in detail, it becomes clear that in many cases noun ending does not serve to establish a significant statistical pattern with respect to gender assignment. However, some very large groups of words share some very productive terminal morphemes, which are invariably masculine or feminine. Sorting out noun ending from terminal morphemes makes it much easier to identify patterns of gender assignment in a system that is otherwise quite random and arbitrary. Article History: Date received: September 08, 2006 Date revision received: August 22, 2007

Speech processing by human listeners derives meaning from acoustic input via intermediate steps involving abstract representations of what has been heard. Recent results from several lines of research are here brought together to shed light on the nature and role of these representations. In spoken-word recognition, representations of phonological form and of conceptual content are dissociable. This follows from the independence of patterns of priming for a word's form and its meaning. The nature of the phonological-form representations is determined not only by acoustic-phonetic input but also by other sources of information, including metalinguistic knowledge. This follows from evidence that listeners can store two forms as different without showing any evidence of being able to detect the difference in question when they listen to speech. The lexical representations are in turn separate from prelexical representations, which are also abstract in nature. This follows from evidence that perceptual learning about speaker-specific phoneme realization, induced on the basis of a few words, generalizes across the whole lexicon to inform the recognition of all words containing the same phoneme. The efficiency of human speech processing has its basis in the rapid execution of operations over abstract representations. Keywords: Speech processing; Phonemes; Lexicon; Representations.

Phonics and fluency are two main ingredients in the teaching of reading and in children's reading development (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development [NICHD], 2000). They can be [...]

Four experiments used the psychological refractory period logic to examine whether integration of multiple sources of phonemic information has a decisional locus. All experiments made use of a dual-task paradigm in which participants made forced-choice color categorization (Task 1) and phoneme categorization (Task 2) decisions at varying stimulus onset asynchronies. In Experiment l, Task 2 difficulty was manipulated using words containing matching or mismatching coarticulatory cues to the final consonant. The results showed that difficulty and onset asynchrony combined in an underadditive way, suggesting that the phonemic mismatch was resolved prior to a central decisional bottleneck. Similar results were found in Experiment 2 using nonwords. In Experiment 3, the manipulation of task difficulty involved lexical status, which once again revealed an underadditive pattern of response times. Finally, Experiment 4 compared this prebottleneck variable with a decisional variable: response key bias. The latter showed an additive pattern of responses. The experiments show that resolution of phonemic ambiguity can take advantage of cognitive slack time at short asynchronies, indicating that phonemic integration takes place at a relatively early stage of spoken word recognition. Keywords: phoneme, spoken word recognition, subcategorical mismatch, psychological refractory period, lexical access

When a listener hears a word (beef), current theories of spoken word recognition posit the activation of both lexical (beef) and sublexical (/b/, /i/, /f/) representations. No lexical representation can be settled on for an unfamiliar utterance (peef). The authors examined the perception of nonwords (peef) as a function of words or nonwords beard 10-20 min earlier. In lexical decision, nonword recognition responses were delayed if a similar word had been heard earlier. In contrast, nonword processing was facilitated by the earlier presentation of a similar nonword (baff-paff). This pattern was observed for both word-initial (beef-peef), and word-final (job-jop) deviation. With the word-in-noise task, real word primes (beef) increased real word intrusions for the target nonword (peef), but only consonant-vowel (CV) or vowel-consonant (VC) intrusions were increased with similar pseudoword primes (baff-paff). The results across tasks and experiments support both a lexical neighborhood view of activation and sublexical representations based on chunks larger than individual phonemes (CV or VC sequences). Keywords: spoken word recognition, perception, sublexical representation, neighborhood, cohort

These experiments investigated whether bilinguals activate phonological representations from both of their languages when reading silently in one. The critical stimuli were interlingual homophones (e.g., sank in English and cinq in French). French-English and English-French bilinguals completed an English lexical decision task. Decisions made by French-English bilinguals were significantly faster and more accurate for interlingual homophones than for matched English control words. In subsequent experiments, the homophone facilitation effect in the latency data disappeared when distractors were changed to pseudohomophones, when cognates and interlingual homographs were added to the experiment, and when the proportion of critical stimuli was decreased. However, the homophone effect in the error data remained. In contrast, English-French bilinguals revealed little evidence of an interlingual homophone effect. Several attempts were made to increase the saliency of the nontarget language, however these manipulations produced only a small effect in the error data. These results indicate that the activation of phonological representations can appear to be both language-specific and nonspecific depending on the proficiency of the bilinguals and whether they are reading in their weaker or stronger language. Keywords: bilinguals, phonology, word recognition, interlingual homophones

This study examined the effects of experimentally imposed alphabet cues on the perception of individual sound segments relative to a no cues control condition. Eight speakers with dysarthria and 128 [...]

The aim of this paper is to provide further evidence that orthography plays a central role in phonemic awareness, by demonstrating an orthographic congruency effect in phoneme deletion. In four initial phoneme deletion experiments, adult participants produced the correct response more slowly with orthographically mismatched stimulus--response pairs (e.g., worth--earth) than with matched pairs (e.g., wage--age). This orthographic effect occurred with or without specific instructions to ignore spelling and when stimuli were presented with or without the to-be-deleted sound. In a final experiment, participants made more errors on complex than simple onset items, but there was no interaction with orthographic mismatch. The repeated observation of this robust orthographic effect suggests that participants are at least aware of orthography during phonemic awareness tasks, and it supports the view that phonemic awareness is directly subserved by orthography.

This work examines the association between symbols and their representation in adult developmental dyscalculia and dyslexia. Experiment l used comparative judgment of numerals, and it was found that in physical comparisons (e.g., 3-5 vs. 3-5) the dyscalculia group showed a significantly smaller congruity effect than did the dyslexia and the control groups. Experiment 2 used Navon figures (D. Navon, 1977) in Hebrew, and participants were asked to name the large or the small letters. Phoneme similarity modulated performance of the control and the dyscalculia groups and showed a very small effect in the dyslexia group. This suggests that the dyscalculia population has difficulties in automatically associating numerals with magnitudes but no problems in associating letters with phonemes, whereas the dyslexia population shows the opposite pattern. Keywords: developmental dyslexia, developmental dyscalculia, phonemes, quantities

Purpose: To study the role of visual perception of phonemes in visual perception of sentences and words among normal-hearing individuals. Method: Twenty-four normal-hearing adults identified consonants, words, and sentences, spoken by either a human or a synthetic talker. The synthetic talker was programmed with identical parameters within phoneme groups, hypothetically resulting in simplified articulation. Proportions of correctly identified phonemes per participant, condition, and task, as well as sensitivity to single consonants and clusters of consonants, were measured. Groups of mutually exclusive consonants were used for sensitivity analyses and hierarchical cluster analyses. Results: Consonant identification performance did not differ as a function of talker, nor did average sensitivity to single consonants. The bilabial and labiodental clusters were most readily identified and cohesive for both talkers. Word and sentence identification was better for the human talker than the synthetic talker. The participants were more sensitive to the clusters of the least visible consonants with the human talker than with the synthetic talker. Conclusions: It is suggested that ability to distiguish between clusters of the least visually distinct phonemes is important in speechreading. Specifically, it reduces the number of candidates, and thereby facilitates lexical identification. KEY WORDS: speechreading, articulation, students, normal hearing, For normal-hearing persons under normal listening conditions, speech perception and understanding are effortless and accurate. If the acoustic or sensory information is degraded (e.g., by noise or hearing impairment) seeing [...]

The present contribution is meant to draw attention to two or more apparent sound correspondences among the languages of the Philippines and western Indonesia that involve liquid phonemes in one [...]

Rotokas is famous for possessing one of the world's smallest phoneme inventories. According to one source, the Central dialect of Rotokas possesses only 11 segmental phonemes (five vowels and six [...]

Relationships among articulation, vocabulary, phonemic awareness, and word reading were examined in 45 children who spoke either Hmong or Spanish as their primary language. A theoretical perspective suggesting that English articulation and vocabulary would influence children's English phonemic awareness and English word reading was developed. Articulation influenced both kindergarten phonemic awareness and 1st-grade word reading. Letter-sound knowledge was also associated with kindergarten phonemic awareness, and 1st-grade phonemic awareness was related to 1st-grade word reading. The results are discussed in relationship to 2nd-language speech, articulation, and beginning reading. Keywords: articulation, vocabulary, English language learners, oral proficiency, early reading

Previous studies have suggested that normative (L2) linguistic sounds are accommodated to native language (L1) phonemic categories. However, this conclusion may be compromised by the use of explicit discrimination tests. The present study provides an implicit measure of L2 phoneme discrimination in early bilinguals (Catalan and Spanish). Participants classified the 1st syllable of disyllabic stimuli embedded in lists where the 2nd, task-irrelevant, syllable could contain a Catalan contrastive variation (/[epsilon]/-/e/) or no variation. Catalan dominants responded more slowly in lists where the 2nd syllable could vary from trial to trial, suggesting an indirect effect of the/[epsilon]/-/e/discrimination. Spanish dominants did not suffer this interference, performing indistinguishably from Spanish monolinguals. The present findings provide implicit evidence that even proficient bilinguals categorize L2 sounds according to their LI representations. Keywords: speech perception, bilingualism, second language perception, phonemic discrimination, attention

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of fundamental frequency ([F.sub.0]) on stop consonant voice onset time (VOT). VOT was measured from the recordings of 56 young men reading phrases containing all 6 English voiced and voiceless stops in word-initial position across high-, medium-, and low-[F.sub.0] levels. Separate analyses of variance for the voiced and voiceless stops revealed no significant main effect for [F.sub.0] for the voiced stops but a significant [F.sub.0] effect for the voiceless stops. Across the voiceless stops, productions at high [F.sub.0]s displayed significantly shorter VOTs than productions at low or mid [F.sub.0]s. The findings indicated that researchers must take into account the [F.sub.0] level at which voiceless stop VOT is measured. KEY WORDS: voice onset time, fundamental frequency, acoustic measures, temporal-acoustic, Voice onset time (VOT) has been established as an important temporal-acoustic measure for distinguishing stop consonant voicing and, to a lesser degree, place of articulation during speech across a variety [...]

Auditory event-related potentials (mismatch negativity and P300) and behavioral discrimination were measured to synthetically generated consonant--vowel (CV) speech and nonspeech contrasts in 10 young adults with normal auditory systems. Previous research has demonstrated that behavioral and P300 responses reflect a phonetic, categorical level of processing. The aims of the current investigation were (a) to examine whether the mismatch negativity (MMN) response is also influenced by the phonetic characteristics of a stimulus or if it reflects purely an acoustic level of processing and (b) to expand our understanding of the neurophysiology underlying categorical perception, a phenomenon crucial in the processing of speech. The CVs were 2 within-category stimuli and the nonspeech stimuli were 2 glides whose frequency ramps matched the formant transitions of the CV stimuli. Listeners exhibited better behavioral discrimination to the nonspeech versus speech stimuli in same/different and oddball behavioral paradigms. MMN responses were elicited by the nonspeech stimuli, but absent to CV speech stimuli. Larger amplitude and earlier P300s were elicited by the nonspeech stimuli, while smaller and longer latency P300s were elicited by the speech stimulus contrast. Results suggest that the 2 types of stimuli were processed differently when measured behaviorally, with MMN, or P300. The better discrimination and clearer neurophysiological representation of the frequency glide, nonspeech stimuli versus the CV speech stimuli of analogous acoustic content support (a) categorical perception representation at the level of the MMN generators and (b) parallel processing of acoustic (sensory) and phonetic (categorical) information at the level of the MMN generators. KEY WORDS: auditory evoked potentials, mismatch negativity, P300, categorical perception, speech perception, A major challenge in the study of speech perception has been specifying how a listener parses continuous acoustic signals into discrete categorical representations. Much of the early work on speech [...]

Research has shown that children repeat high-probability phoneme sequences more accurately than low-probability ones. This effect attenuates with age, and its decrease is predicted by developmental changes in the size of the lexicon (J. Edwards, M. E. Beckman, & B. Munson, 2004; B. Munson, 2001; B. Munson, J. Edwards, & M. Beckman, 2005). This study expands on these findings by examining relationships between vocabulary size and repetition accuracy of nonwords varying in phonotactic probability by 16 children with specific language impairment (SLI), 16 chronological-age-matched (CA) peers with typical speech and language development, and 16 younger children matched with the children with SLI on vocabulary size (VS). As in previous research, children with SLI repeated nonwords less accurately than did CA children. The children with SLI and the VS children showed similar levels of nonword repetition accuracy. Phonotactic probability affected repetition accuracy more for children with SLI and VS children than for CA children. Regression analyses showed that measures of vocabulary size were the best predictor of the difference in repetition accuracy between high- and low-probability sequences. Analyses by items showed that measures of phonotactic probability were stronger predictors of repetition accuracy than judgments of wordlikeness. Taken together, the results support research demonstrating that vocabulary size mediates the influence of phonotactic probability on nonword repetition, perhaps due to its influence on the ongoing refinement of phonological categories. KEY WORDS: language impairment, school-age children, nonword repetition, phonotactic probability, vocabulary size, In a nonword repetition task, a person listens to an unfamiliar string of phonemes and repeats it. While superficially a simple task, nonword repetition relies on a number of cognitive [...]

Byline: Irene Appelbaum (1) Keywords: emergence; language origins; phonemes; speech Abstract: Bjorn Lindblom's account of the emergence of phonemic structure is a central reference point in contemporary discussions of the emergence of language. I argue that there are two distinct, and largely orthogonal conceptions of emergence implicit in Lindblom's account. According to one conception ('causal emergence'), the process by which minimal pairs are generated is crucial to the claim that phonemic structure is emergent according to the other conception ('analytic emergence'), the fact that segments are an abstraction from the physical signal is what is crucial to the description of phonemic structure as emergent. The purpose of distinguishing rather than conflating these two conceptions of emergence is not in the first instance to criticize Lindblom's account or to force us to choose between the two conceptions for consistency, but rather to give us a more detailed purchase on the notoriously thorny concept of emergent explanation. Author Affiliation: (1) Department of Philosophy, University of Montana, Missoula, Montana, 59812, USA Article History: Registration Date: 10/07/2004 Online Date: 23/05/2005

Within Evolutionary Phonology, recurrent sound patterns are argued to be a direct consequence of recurrent types of phonetically based sound change. Common phonological alternations like final obstruent devoicing, place-assimilation, intervocalic [...]

Abstract Seventeen native English speakers participated in an investigation of language users' knowledge of English main stress patterns. First, they produced 40 two-syllable nonwords of varying syllabic structure as nouns [...]

Although it has generally been assumed that Namakir is the only Vanuatu language that has a phonemic reflex of Proto-Oceanic *q, recent data collected from a number of languages in [...]

This article describes and summarizes research studies that analyze the shared and unique contributions of phonemic awareness and rapid naming to reading development. Three questions were addressed. Does phonemic awareness [...]

The phonological priming paradigm, in which participants respond to the second of 2 consecutively presented spoken words, has the potential to be a useful tool with which to study lexical processing. Concerns about response biases distorting the results have persisted since its introduction. This study explored the manifestation of biases by modifying the standard priming experiment such that the magnitude of priming effects using the same items could be compared at different points during the testing session. Four experiments investigated whether a recent dissociation of response biases and priming effects is evidence of lexical inhibition when the prime and target overlap by the first 3 word-initial phonemes (M. Hamburger & L. M. Slowiaczek, 1996). Biases were found in conditions previously thought to prevent their influence.

The aim of this study was to investigate how postlingually severely or profoundly hearing-impaired adults relearn to recognize consonants after receiving multichannel cochlear implants. Consonant recognition of 19 Finnish-speaking subjects was studied for a minimum of 6 months and a maximum of 24 months using an open-set nonsense-syllable test in a prospective repeated-measure design. Responses were coded for phoneme errors, and proportions of correct responses and 95% confidence intervals were calculated for recognition and confusions. Two years after the switch-on, the mean recognition of consonants was 71% (95% confidence interval = 68-73%). The manner of articulation was easier to classify than the place of articulation, and the consonants [s], [r], [k], [t], [p], [n], and [j] were easier to recognize than [h], [m], [l], and [v]. Adaptation to electrical hearing with a multichannel cochlear implant was successful, but consonants with alveolar, palatal, or velar transitions (high F2) were better recognized than consonants with labial transitions (low F2). The locus of the F2 transitions of the consonants with better recognition was at the frequencies 1.5-2 kHz, whereas the locus of the F2 transitions of the consonants with poorer recognition was at 1.2-1.4 kHz. A tendency to confuse consonants with the closest consonant with higher F2 transition was also noted. KEY WORDS: cochlear implant, syllable test, speech recognition, consonant recognition, consonant confusions, Distortion of phoneme signals often leads to a distorted perception of the message, which is common in hearing impairments. The perception of consonants depends both on context-dependent acoustic cues (Miller [...]

S. E. Gathercole, C. R. Frankish, S. J. Pickering, and S. Peaker (1999) reported 2 experiments in which they manipulated phonotactic properties of nonword stimuli and observed the effects on serial recall. Their results show superior recall for items consisting of more frequent phoneme pairs (biphone frequency). Biphone frequency was counted as the number of 3 phoneme words in which the phoneme pair occurs. In the first experiment of the current article, the authors made the same manipulation while controlling for the number of lexical neighbors and found no effect of biphone frequency. In the second experiment, the authors manipulated neighborhood size while controlling biphone frequency and found a significant effect of neighborhood size. The authors argued that serial recall of nonwords is influenced by lexical rather than sublexical knowledge.

Research suggests for people who speak two languages the target language and the language not being used are simultaneously activated. Fluent Catalan-Spanish users took longer to reject phonemes appearing in Spanish words than in the control word when deciding if phonemes were in the Catalan name of a picture.

This article examines the usefulness of identifying systemic culture patterns as discrete units of culture in cross-cultural research. Systemic patterns, such as kinship terminology and phonemic structures, have culturally universal features and can provide insight into the processes of cultural evolution and transmission.

Research on memory in children indicates that the origination of the lexicality effect occurs just before recall in the item information redintegration, a process mostly bypassed in serial recognition. While the lexicality effect was produced by an increase of nonword phoneme identity errors, phonological similarity effect arose due to phoneme order errors.

The Snowbird Cherokee in Graham County, NC, shows phonological transfer from the traditional language while accommodating the /ai/ and /oi/ English vowel patterns. This shift is typical of gradual transfer from one language to another.

The ability to segment phonemes in words is fundamental for learning to read and spell. In two experiments, kindergartners segmented 2- and 3-phoneme words in an oral task using blank markers. Children segmented vowel-consonant (VC) words (e.g., age) more easily than consonant-vowel (CV) words (e.g., me) and much more easily than consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) words (e.g., same). The greater ease of segmenting VC over CV words is attributed to the salience of vowels in initial position. The rime-cohesion hypothesis predicted segmentation performance with CVC but not with CV and VC words, indicating that rimes are a structural property of 3- but not 2-phoneme words. A practical implication is that instruction in phoneme segmentation should begin with 2-phoneme words before 3-phoneme words are taught.

A review of 15 studies confirms that training in phonemic awareness has a larger effect on tests of phonemic awareness than on tests of real word reading and reading comprehension.