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Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is characterized by impaired development of social communication, cognition, emotions and behavior. This study explores the reading performance of Chinese–English bilinguals with ASD in Hong Kong in relation to local coherence under the Central Coherence Theory. Two tasks were conducted with 22 Chinese–English bilinguals with ASD (M = 9;07), whose mean age was 9 years old and seven months at time of study, and 24 typically developing (TD) controls (M = 9;04), whose mean age was 9 years old and 4 months, to investigate reading at the word and sentence levels. Two groups of participants were matched by chronological age and grade level. Based on the Central Coherence Theory, children with ASD are expected to have difficulty using context to disambiguate between homophones or homographs. We first employed a homograph task using two-character Chinese words to investigate context effects. Participants of both groups were given 40 pairs of words in which the first character provided a contextual cue to the pronunciation of the second, or vice versa. The findings suggested that participants with ASD were able to use the local context to give appropriate pronunciations of the homographs, performing as well as TD participants given the word-level context and explicit instructions. In the homophone task, participants judged the use of homophones based on the content of the sentence. While the results for English homophones were consistent with previous homograph studies, judgements of the Chinese homophones depended instead on the word level. The participants benefitted from the immediate Chinese linguistic context, ignoring global features and focusing on local ones. These two results contradicted previous findings in studies on English where participants with ASD showed difficulty in distinguishing homographs. We suggest this is because in Chinese, one character in a two-character word can serve as a contextual cue to the pronunciation of homographs or usage of homophones. Therefore, immediate linguistic context and local contextual cues facilitate children with ASD’s reading of homographs/homophones in Chinese.

This article reports the results of an auditory lexical decision task, testing the processing of phonetic detail of English noun/verb conversion pairs. The article builds on recent findings showing that the frequent occurrence in certain prosodic environments may lead to the storage of prosody-induced phonetic detail as part of the lexical representation. To investigate this question with noun/verb conversion pairs, ambicategorical stimuli were used that exhibit systematic occurrence differences with regard to prosodic environment, as indicated by either a strong verb-bias, e.g., talk (N/V) or a strong noun-bias, e.g., voice (N/V). The auditory lexical decision task tests whether acoustic properties reflecting either the typical or the atypical prosodic environment impact the processing of recordings of the stimuli. In doing so assumptions about the storage of prosody-induced phonetic detail are tested that distinguish competing model architectures. The results are most straightforwardly accounted for within an abstractionist architecture, in which the acoustic signal is mapped onto a representation that is based on the canonical pronunciation of the word.

Korean can be transcribed in two different scripts, one alphabetic (Hangul) and one logographic (Hanja). How does the mental lexicon represent the contributions of multiple scripts? Hangul’s highly transparent one-to-one relationship between spellings and sounds creates homophones in spoken Korean that are also homographs in Hangul, which can only be disambiguated through Hanja. We thus tested whether native speakers encoded the semantic contributions of the different Hanja characters sharing the same homographic form in Hangul in their mental representation of Sino-Korean. Is processing modulated by the number of available meanings, that is, the size of the semantic cohort? In two cross-modal lexical decision tasks with semantic priming,participants were presented with auditory primes that were either syllables (Experiment 1) or full Sino-Korean words (Experiment 2), followed by visual Sino-Korean full word targets. In Experiment 1, reaction times were not significantly modulated by the size of the semantic cohort. However, in Experiment 2, we observed significantly faster reaction times for targets preceded by primes with larger semantic cohorts. We discuss these findings in relation to the structure of the mental lexicon for bi-scriptal languages and the representation of semantic cohorts across different scripts. 1. Introduction 2. Hanja and Hangul during processing 3. Experiment 1: Cross-modal fragment priming 3.1. Method 3.1.1. Participants 3.1.2. Materials and design 3.1.3. Procedure 3.2. Results 3.3. Discussion 4. Experiment 2: Cross-modal full word priming 4.1. Method 4.1.1. Participants 4.1.2. Materials and design 4.1.3. Procedure 4.2. Results 4.3. Discussion 5. General discussion 6. Conclusions

The demonstrative/filler neige in Mandarin Chinese is potentially contentious outside that language,as it bears resemblance in terms of pronunciation with a racial slur in English. Nonetheless, neigedoes not possess any racist connotation in Mandarin Chinese, and its analysis needs to take intoconsideration historical and contextual information. The form neige is a colloquialism of its formalequivalent nage, which has functioned as a demonstrative determiner/pronoun or a discoursemarker in verbal communication since ancient periods. The derivation of nei from na is realisedvia suppression of the demonstrative with the numeral yi ‘one’, and this phenomenon occurredeven before Mandarin was invented as a national lingua franca. Differently from languages suchas English in which the number of homophones is limited, Chinese contains an enormous amountof syllables with myriads of homophones, owing to the fact that Chinese is a tone language thatdepends on tone implications to differentiate meanings and syllables/words are hence predominantlymono- or bi-morphemic. As a consequence, homophones pertaining to Chinese aboundboth language-internally and cross-linguistically. Among the repercussions of homophony are theliterary inquisitions during the Qing era that sabotaged freedom of creation. Therefore, the interpretationand comprehension of neige need to be objective and impartial.

Aims and objectives: Few previous studies of bilingual cognition have theorized the impact of being literate in distinct orthographies. This study examined: (1) How do differences in the way writing systems represent sound affect biscriptal bilinguals’ segmentation of spoken words in each language? and (2) What is the impact of the first learned orthography? These questions were addressed in native and non-native readers of Hindi and English. The primary unit of writing in Hindi is the akshara, which corresponds to a syllable in most cases, whereas for English the unit of writing corresponds to a phoneme. Method: Hindi-English users listened to cross-language homophones in Hindi and English. Participants were instructed to take away “the first sound” of each word and say aloud what remained. Data analysis: Percent deletion of the initial phoneme was examined. Exp. 1 included 44 bilinguals. Exp. 2 tested 13 bilinguals. Findings/conclusions: For native English readers the first phoneme was deleted regardless of language. For native readers of Hindi, performance differed by language: the “first sound” was a phoneme for English words but a syllable for Hindi words (except for vowel-initial words). Originality: Using a novel paradigm, this study demonstrates that biscriptal bilinguals’ conceptions of speech sounds are differentially shaped by their knowledge of the written forms of those sounds: deleting “the first sound” in /sʌfʌr/ resulted in /fʌr/ when it was presented as a Hindi word but as /ʌfʌr/ when presented as English. Thus, the very same spoken word can yield different conceptions depending on whether it is heard as a word belonging to one language or another. Significance/implications: The findings indicate that language-specific orthographic knowledge influences biscriptal bilinguals’ conceptualization of speech sounds in their respective languages. More generally, our study argues for more research on biscriptal bilinguals in the study of bilingual cognition.

Spelling has been found to be influenced by the frequency with which certain orthographic patterns occur. We examined whether Grades 2–5 children were already sensitive to orthographic frequency in spelling present tense verb inflections that sound the same but are spelled differently. Children were asked to spell present tenses in two homophonous forms; both inflections are pronounced with final /t/ but are spelled with final -d (“ik vind,” I find) or -dt (“hij/zij vindt,” he/she finds). Previous research has shown that adolescents and adults make inflection errors based on the relative frequency within a pair; as “vind’ is more frequent than “vindt,” “vind” is often used incorrectly. The children showed low correct scores for third person singular spellings, and overall better performance for -d dominant verbs. Surprisingly, they did make errors related to homophone inflection but in the wrong place, marking the wrong time: homophone-based errors occurred in present tense non-homophone verbs and in past tenses. We take our findings to mean that the children were not sensitive to homophone dominance. Furthermore, the findings illustrate the importance of specific graphotactic patterns in literacy development and call for attention to these patterns in models and teaching of spelling.

International audience; Speech perception involves segmenting a continuous stream of speech into its word components. This can be challenging in the case of homophonous utterances only differing in non-contrastive subphonemic features. Yet, the speech perception system seems able to discriminate subphonemic deviation in homophonous utterances, since it has been shown to elicit a mismatch response (MMN). Here, we focused on the oscillatory correlates, namely phase resetting and power, of non-contrastive subphonemic deviation processing in language. An oddball task that considered natural intraspeaker variability was used.Subphonemic deviance elicited intertrial phase coherence (ITC) differences in the theta band at Fz during the time window of the MMN. No differences in power were found. This suggests that the processing of subphonemic deviation in speech signals, reflected by the MMN, might rely on mechanisms of phase resetting. ITC might facilitate the synchronous firing of functional networks involved in the processing of subphonemic deviance

Linguistic ambiguity is a pervasive phenomenon in language. It occurs when a word, phrase, or sentence has more than one meaning. Although it is often considered a problem since it may cause confusion and hinder the precise understanding of language, it has its own value. Linguistic ambiguity enriches language and produces positive effects such as creating irony and adding a sort of humor. This study focuses on how lexical ambiguity, one type of linguistic ambiguity, can be a source of verbal humor. The data of the study are 20 examples of jokes and riddles that are taken from three internet sites; each example relies on lexical ambiguity. The data are analyzed to identify the words that contain lexical ambiguity in the selected jokes and riddles, classify them into the forms of lexical ambiguity, i.e. homonymy with its three sub-types (absolute homonymy, homophone and homograph) and polysemy showing the frequency of each form, and illustrate how lexical ambiguity can create a sort of humor in the light of the Incongruity Theory of humor. The results of the data analysis show that lexical ambiguity can create verbal humor according to the Incongruity Theory of humor. Also, it reveals that the ambiguous words involved in the selected jokes and riddles are of the two forms of lexical ambiguity, i.e. homonymy and polysemy and that homonymy is the most frequently used form of lexical ambiguity whereas polysemy is the least. Keywords: Lexical ambiguity, Verbal Humor, Absolute Homonymy, Homophone, Polysemy

Within research into the early modern maritime world and the contemporary treatment of sex and sexual expression in both Europe and America two terms continuously emerge and often appear linked: se...

There have been widely exposed researches that analyze accented and intelligible speech of foreign language; yet, the study concerning listeners' awareness of the pronunciation errors is hardly found. Therefore, the current study aims to find out segmental features and the source of errors that have caused unintelligible speech of Indonesian-accented speech and describe the listeners' awareness of the errors. This descriptive qualitative research investigates listeners' transcripts of Indonesian-accented speeches through purposive sampling. The standard orthography transcripts are then transformed into phonemic transcripts. They are analyzed by error analysis based on phonological operation by Davenport and Hannahs. The result is further checked by the listeners to generate their awareness of the errors through interviews. There are consonants causing unintelligibility more than vowels. Furthermore, it is found that there are six pronunciation features affecting listeners' awareness of speakers' pronunciation errors: 1) aspiration, 2) spelling system, 3) blended phonemes, 4) absent phonemes, 5) different articulation, and 6) homophone in the research.

This paper summarizes eight types of error of terminology in the patent text in the output of Machine Translation from English into Chinese, including term being mistranslated as a verb, term being mistranslated as a common noun, term being redundantly translated, term being mistranslated as a homophone, term being mistranslated as a wrong term, term being mistranslated due to Chinese expression, term being mistranslated without initial, and term being mistranslated due to wrong acronym. These errors can be solved by the translator before Machine Translation and the translator can identify and correct these errors by pre-editing of the source text.

This study explores the relationship between the experience of confusion and the outcomes of Chinese character learning by learners of Chinese as a heritage language (CHL). Based on the claim that ...

Poza kobiercem i tkaninami, które rzeczywiście sprowadzano z Persji lub wytwarzano w naszych persjarniach, pozostałe rzeczowniki występujące w polskich konstrukcjach frazeologicznych z przymiotnikiem „perski” mają z Persją niewiele wspólnego. Podobnie jest z perskim kotem, który wcześniej był znany w Europie jako kot angorski (ankarski) i którego sprowadzano do Europy także z Turcji i Damaszku (kot damasceński). Tak samo perski proszek był w istocie pochodzenia kaukaskiego, karakuły wywodzą się z Azji Środkowej (miejscowość Karakul w Uzbekistanie), zaś perskie oko było francuskim kalamburem: l’œil perçant ‘oko bystre, przenikliwe’ wymawiane tak samo jak l’œil persan ‘perskie oko’ The subject of the article are certain idiomatic expressions constructed with the adjective perski (‘Persian’) in Polish: perskie oko (‘Persian eye’), perski dywan (‘Persian carpet’), perski proszek (‘Persian powder’) etc. Moreover, the author attempts to answer the question: What do we have that is really perski (‘Persian’) in Polish? Are these phrases really related to Persia or Persians, or are they just a word game (homophones)? So far the origin of the most popular one, i.e. perskie oko (‘Persian eye’) has not been established even though a lively discussion on this subject was held on the pages of the Język Polski 90 years ago. It was started by Stanisław Szober who in his book Life of words, explained the origin of the phrase perskie oko for the first time, indicating that it is a semantic borrowing from French, and its basis is l’oeil perçant ‘piercing eye’. In response, Józef Birkenmajer claimed this popular phrase comes from Krakow, relating it – quite incredibly – to a Persian man on the label of the popular Zacherlin insecticide powder called perski proszek (‘Persian powder’). It turns out that the source of this expression was a French anecdote by Alphonse Karr from the late nineteenth century based precisely on the word game.

This study aims to describe the formation of dajare and examine the effects of dajare on speech partners. The data in this study were taken from the anime series entitled Monogatari Series. Data from the anime series were collected using the contextual analysis method. The results showed seven dajare formation processes: homophones, mora change, metathesis mora, combining phrases, dividing phrases, mixing foreign languages, and moving commas. It was found that the effect of dajare on speech partners was mainly positive.

This research is conducted to reveal how humorous utterances are constructed by manipulating semantic meaning especially dealing with lexical semantics. Lexical semantics provides multiple meanings that portray their meanings’ relationship among a word and they are potentially exploited to elicit humor. This research examines utterances manipulating lexical semantics as the strategy of humor creation in Mind Your Language situation comedy. Applying a descriptive qualitative approach, the findings indicate that five types of lexical semantics are utilized as strategies of humorous utterances creation. Those types of lexical semantics are polysemy, homonymy, homophone, hyponymy, dan synonymy. Because of their multiple relation meanings, the speaker can refer to other meanings to construct different meanings with the hearer. The speaker constructs an incongruent meaning between what the hearer’s perception is and what the speaker meant. The deviation of lexical semantics between the hearer and the speaker completely illustrates the concept of incongruity theory of humor.Â

The graphemic distinctiveness of simple word stems in written English (henceforth stems) is usually discussed in terms of the discrimination of homophones: Two or more distinct stems that share a phonological form each have a unique graphemic form (e.g., meat / meet; pair / pear / pare) and in some cases we cannot ascribe the different spellings to etymology: scent ‘should’ be spelled sent given its history (borrowed from French sentir and Latin sentire). The lists in Carney (1994) and Venezky (1999) of heterographic words show that there is a considerable number of homophones that are discriminated in spelling. But there are also many homographic cases (e.g., bank, can), so any stipulated ‘principle of heterography’ is not universal. In this paper, we determine the scope and limitations of this principle empirically. Using the CELEX corpus as well as printed dictionaries, we first determine the number of homophonous simple stems in our data (like bank / bank or pair / pear / pare). Of these, we determine the fraction that has a distinct spelling (like pair / pear / pare). The overall ratio is well below 50%, which means that the principle is not as far-reaching as often assumed. Historically, it appears that in many cases we are not dealing with a graphemic differentiation of stems, but with a conservation of spellings. As a consequence, most distinctive spellings probably corresponded to distinctive sound forms at some point in their history. Sound change then led to homophony, but the graphemic form often remained distinct (as with e.g. loan / lone). Expressing lexical differences in the written form of stems does not seem to be overly important to English writers; there is no widespread lexical or morphological principle at work when it comes to the spelling of English stems.

We examine the use of multiple subphonemic differences distinguishing homophones in production and perception, through a case study focusing on the distinction between two polysemous senses of the English word “sorry” (apology vs. attention-seeking). An analysis of production data from voice actors revealed significant and substantial durational differences between the two meanings. Tokens expressing an apology were longer than attention-seeking tokens, and the situational intensity of the context also independently affected duration. When asked to identify the meaning in a two-way forced-choice task after hearing each token spliced out of its context, listeners were above chance (64.7% accuracy) in identifying the intended meaning, and their responses were significantly correlated with the duration, intensity, and intonation contour (but not mean F0) of the productions. In a second perception task, listeners heard tokens of “sorry” that had been systematically manipulated to vary in duration, intensity, and intonation contour, with responses indicating that each of these dimensions played an independent role in listeners’ judgments. The results highlight the importance of broadening the scope of research on the use of subphonemic detail during lexical access and considering a wider range of lexical and non-lexical factors that condition variability on multiple acoustic dimensions, in order to work toward a more accurate picture of the systematic variability available in the input and tracked by listeners.

The article deals with the analysis and description of expressive-figurative means of original or occasional expression in functional-semantic and structural aspects.The pragmatic relevance of the formation of expressive forms of professional communication lies in the linguistic-creative expression of military team members' communicative need to overcome the stylistic neutrality of professional discourse terms. In so doing, they create a linguistic-cultural space for the self-realization of the personality in a specific professional environment. The fixed uniformity of linguistic rules establishes the sustainable order of their formal and content expression. The possibility of associative variation of the standard and creative components in the semantics of words results in the emergence of forms differing from the system of word formation, spelling and orthoepic norms. Structurally, owing to homonymy, polysemy, and homonymity, the constituent elements of the puns can be words as well as phrases. The phonetic-graphical coincidence or divergence of the kernel components of homophrasal puns and the nature of their formal expression creates various semantic forms. Moreover, the stylistic resource for the creative use of the language play includes intentional parody assimilation of paronymic lexemes, contextual identification of explicit and implicit homophones and their punning perception, simultaneous objectification of direct and associativefigurative meanings in specially built contextsdue to the semantic ambiguity of lexemes, the deliberate mispronunciation of foreign toponyms, the insertion of occasional expressive elements into the word structure, the phonographic and content reduction and combination of initial motivational forms and, as a consequence, the formation of pun-based contaminated units.

The frequency with which a word appears in the lexicon has implications for its pronunciation. Numerous studies have shown that high-frequency lemma are characterized by more phonetic reduction than lower-frequency lemma. These findings have proven to be particularly useful in the study of homophones where frequency-related reduction processes can give insights into lexical access theories. The majority of research on homophones and frequency effects has focused on heterographic and semantically unrelated homophones (e.g., Englishtime – thyme) or investigated zero-derived homophones (e.g., Englishthe cut, noun –to cut, verb). Here, zero inflection in German pluralization (e.g.,ein Würfel‘one die’–zwei Würfel‘two dice’) was investigated to determine if and how frequency effects impact on the acoustic realization of the homophonous singular-plural word pairs. The findings indicate that the number-specified wordforms show acoustic variation related to wordform frequency and the relative frequency of the singular to plural inflected forms. Results differ for durations of wordforms, stem vowels, and final phonemes. Our findings have implications for lexical access theories and can inform about ‘frequency inheritance’ across the singular and plural homophones of the zero-inflected plurals.

Communicating via language is an important property of human beings. Usually one does not think of the relations between words. But from linguistic perspective, the words are not single units. They are linked to each other by semantic and formal relations. The focus of this paper is on different lexemes in English and Arabic. So, this research aims to investigate the major errors which EFL students encounter by the misuse of different lexemes. This is achieved through using the elicitation instrument by implementing two tests. A pretest and a posttest for the sixth-grade students. First the students face problems in dealing with homonyms, synonyms, antonyms and homophones as a result of negative interference between the two languages, Arabic and English. After extensive training the students get good results. They are able to overcome the ambiguity of these lexemes. This shows the importance of learning lexemes in both languages as this simplifies the communication and identifies the areas of ambiguity.

The current study investigated whether shared phonology across languages activates cross-language meaning when reading in context. Eighty-five bilinguals read English sentences while their eye movements were tracked. Critical sentences contained English members of English-French interlingual homophone pairs (e.g., mow; French homophone mate mot means "word") or they contained spelling control words (e.g., mop). Only the meaning of the unseen French homophone mate fit the context (e.g., Hannah wrote another mow/mop on the blackboard for the spelling test). Differences in fixation durations between homophone errors and spelling control errors provided evidence for cross-language activation that extended to semantic representations. When the unseen French homophone was of high frequency, shorter first fixations and gaze durations were observed on English interlingual homophones than on English control words, providing evidence that the French meaning associated with the shared phonology was activated during early stage word identification. Individual differences analyses showed that these effects were larger when bilinguals were using the nontarget language (i.e., French) more regularly in daily life. Results provide evidence that cross-language activation of phonology can be sufficiently strong to activate corresponding semantic representations during single language sentence processing. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

The ability to understand the meaning relationship is the ability to understand the relationship of meaning in sentences which include synonyms, antonyms, homonyms, homographs, homophones, hyponyms; hypernIM, and polysemia. This study aims to find out and describe how the level of students' ability to understand the relationship of meaning in sentences in the aspects above. The method used in this research is descriptive qualitative method, while the technique of collecting data is multiple choice objective test techniques. The population in this study amounted to 218 students and the study sample was set at 54 people. The sampling technique used is the stratified proportional random sampling technique. The results showed that overall, the level of ability to understand meaning relations in the sentence of class XI Even semester of SMK Persada Bandar Lampung was categorized enough with an average score of 68.59. For each aspect, the level of students' ability is as follows: ability of synonymy in good category (77%), ability to understand antonyms in good categories (73.59%), ability to understand homonyms in good categories (73.70), ability to understand homophones in good categories ( 72.18%), the ability to understand homographs is in the less category (50.35), the ability to understand hyponyms is in the good category (77.74%), the ability to understand hypernimms is in a sufficient category (62.33), and the ability to understand polysemi in the less category (59.62%).

This research was aimed at finding out the ability of students to understand homophone in English. The research was qualitative descriptive research. The subject of the research was the seventh-semester students of the English Department of IAIN Langsa, academic year 2018/2019, that consisted of 32 students. The researchers used documentation as an instrument for collecting the data. The documentation was the result of the test given by a lecturer. The test given by the lecturer consisted of 20 questions about homophone in English. The question was in the form of phonetic transcription. The question consisted of two parts. In the first part, the students must mention two different words from a homophony sound. In the second part, the students must fill in the blank with a correct homophone word by relating to the pronunciation at the end of sentences. After conducting the research, the researchers found that 24 students got low mark because they were only able to answer one until ten questions correctly; 2 students got medium mark because they only answered 11 questions correctly, and six students got high mark because they can answer 12 until 17 questions correctly. Therefore, it can be said that the ability of students to understand homophone in English was not good enough. The problem faced by the students was that they still did not comprehend the concept of homophone in English. As a result of the test given by a lecturer, some students only knew that a homophone consisted of only one word, so they answered only one word, and some students also answered the question with three different words.

Recent studies showed that some adults with dyslexia have difficulty processing sequentially arranged information. In a companion study, this deficit manifested as low accuracy during a word pair comparison task involving same/different decisions when two words differed in their letter sequences. This sequential deficit was associated with left/right spatial letter confusion. In the present study, we found the same underlying difficulty with sequential and spatial letter processing during word spelling. Participants were the same 22 adults with dyslexia and 20 age- and gender-matched controls as in the companion study. In the spelling task, sequential error rates were higher in the dyslexia group, compared to the controls. Measures of accuracy of serial letter order during the spelling task and the word comparison task were correlated. Only three participants, each with dyslexia, produced left/right letter reversals during spelling. These were the same participants who produced left/right errors when naming single letters. They also had profound difficulty with sequential and left/right letter processing in the spelling and word comparison tasks, and they had the most severe spelling impairment. We conclude that this pervasive, persistent difficulty with sequential and spatial reversals contributes to a severe dyslexia subtype. In the dyslexia group as a whole, additional and separate sources of errors were underspecified word representations in long-term memory and homophone errors that likely represent language-based deficits in word knowledge. In the participants, these three factors (sequential/spatial letter confusion, underspecified word form representation, language-based deficits) occurred either as single factors or in combination with each other.

Despite the outgrowing trend on assistive technology assisting blind student to be fully participate in education, the challenges remain in the area of English language learning. The inconsistency of the sound-spelling relationship in English apparently triggers the spelling problems for the Blind student since he tends to encode syllables by as it sounded. This study aims to identify, classify and analyze the spelling errors committed by the blind students in learning English using the classification of NEFR (National Foundation for Educational Research) that comprises the aspects of omissions, substitutions, insertions, transpositions and grapheme substitution. Employing case study design, this research elaborate the spelling error committed by 1 blind EFL learner enrolling an Academic Writing course in English Language Education Program, Faculty of Cultural Studies, Universitas Brawijaya, Indonesia. The findings expose that the blind students tend to frequently do spelling error in the aspect of grapheme substitution followed by omissions, substitutions, and insertion. Some contributive factors that presumably affecting the errors are (1) lack exposure to the formation of the words, (2) inherent of language (silent letter, homophone and borrowing words), (3) different characteristics of L1 and L2, and (4) student’s preferences on reading (use screen reader more than braille text). Thus, the exposure toward phonetics symbol and the sound-letter relationship in English should be more disseminated so the blind student is capable of having a correct spelling.

Thefoot–strutvowel split, which has its origins in 17th century English, is notable for its absence from the speech of Northerners in England, wherestood–studremain homophones – both are pronounced with the same vowel /ʊ/. The present study analyses the speech of 122 speakers from Manchester in the North West of England. Although the vast majority of speakers exhibit no distinction between thefootandstrutlexical sets in minimal-pair production and judgement tests, vowel height is correlated with socio-economic status: the higher the social class, the lower thestrutvowel. Surprisingly, statistical models indicate that vowel class is a significant predictor offoot–strutin Manchester. This means that, for a speech community without the split, there remains an effect in the expected direction:strutvowels are lower thanfootvowels in the vowel space. We suggest that co-articulatory effects of surrounding consonants explain this instrumental difference, as they have significant lowering/heightening effects on the acoustics but are not fully captured by our statistical model. We argue that the perplexing nature of the historical split can be partially accounted for in this data, as the frequency of co-occurring phonetic environments is notably different infootthan instrut, resulting in cumulative effects of co-articulation. We also present evidence of age grading which suggests that middle class speakers may develop a phonetic distinction as they age.

This study examines how individual pragmatic skills, and more specifically, empathy, influences language processing when a temporary lexical ambiguity can be resolved via intonation. We designed a visual-world eye-tracking experiment in which participants could anticipate a referent before disambiguating lexical information became available, by inferring either a contrast meaning or a confirmatory meaning from the intonation contour alone. Our results show that individual empathy skills determine how listeners deal with the meaning alternatives of an ambiguous referent, and the way they use intonational meaning to disambiguate the referent. Listeners with better pragmatic skills (higher empathy) were sensitive to intonation cues when forming sound-meaning associations during the unfolding of an ambiguous referent, and showed higher sensitivity to all the alternative interpretations of that ambiguous referent. Less pragmatically skilled listeners showed weaker processing of intonational meaning because they needed subsequent disambiguating material to select a referent and showed less sensitivity to the set of alternative interpretations. Overall, our results call for taking into account individual pragmatic differences in the study of intonational meaning processing and sentence comprehension in general.