In this experiment, we examined whether beginning readers benefit more from grapheme-phoneme decoding (GPD) than from whole-syllable decoding (WSD) instruction in learning to read and write words. Sixty Brazilian Portuguese-speaking first graders (M age = 6 years 1 month) who knew letter names but could not read or write words were randomly…

Aims: To describe typical phonological development of Brazilian Portuguese (BP)-speaking children, considering the following parameters: age of customary production, acquisition and mastery. Methods & Procedures: Data were collected from 857 children aged between 3 years and 8 years 11 months with typical language and speech development. The…

Feature-based approaches to acquisition principally focus on second language (L2) learners' ability to perceive non-native consonants when the features required are either contrastively present or entirely absent from the first language (L1) grammar. As features may function contrastively or allophonically in the consonant and/or vowel systems of…

This study reports syllable position effects on second language (L2) Portuguese speech perception, revealing that L2 segmental learning may be prone to an influence from the suprasegmental level. The results show that first language (L1) Mandarin learners had diminished performance on the discrimination between the target Portuguese liquids (/l/…

To expand our understanding of script-general and script-specific principles in the learning of letter names, we examined how three characteristics of alphabet letters -- their frequency in printed materials, order in the alphabet, and visual similarity to other letters -- relate to children's letter-name knowledge in four languages with three…