Background: Cleft lip and palate is one of the most common oral and maxillofacial deformities associated with a variety of functional disorders. Cleft palate speech disorder (CPSD) occurs the most frequently and manifests a series of characteristic speech features, which are called cleft speech characteristics. Some scholars believe that children…

Theoretical phonology has at its heart the assumption of two separate levels of speech sound representations: one less abstract, phonetic, 'surface' level, and one more abstract, phonological, 'underlying' level. Descriptions of phonological neutralisation processes such as German final devoicing hinge on the mappings between these two levels, as…

Collocational priming is a priming effect induced by collocationally related words; it has been taken to explain the cognitive reality of collocation. Collocational priming has largely been observed in first language (L1) speakers, whereas work on the representation of collocation in a second language (L2) is still limited. In the present study,…

Computational models of infant word-finding typically operate over transcriptions of infant-directed speech corpora. It is now possible to test models of word segmentation on speech materials, rather than transcriptions of speech. We propose that such modeling efforts be conducted over the speech of the experimental stimuli used in studies…

Reading morphologically complex words requires analysis of their morphemic subunits (e.g., play + er); however, the positional constraints of morphemic processing are still little understood. The current study involved three unprimed lexical decision experiments to directly compare the positional encoding of stems and affixes during reading and to…

Language is a unique skill used by humans to communicate thoughts and feelings. For most individuals, language is understood through different sensory modalities--for instance, hearing auditory words relies on audition, while perceiving visual speech via lipreading and reading written text both utilize the visual system. Although these different…

We examined how noun frequency and the typicality of surrounding linguistic context contribute to children's real-time comprehension. Monolingual English-learning toddlers viewed pairs of pictures while hearing sentences with typical or atypical sentence frames ("Look at the…" vs. "Examine the…"), followed by nouns that were…

Is it possible to acquire a sensitivity to a regularity in language without intending to and without awareness of what it is? In this conceptual replication and extension of an earlier study (Williams, 2005) participants were trained on a semiartificial language in which determiner choice was dependent on noun animacy. Participants who did not…

Letter knowledge and word identification are key skills for reading and spelling. Letter knowledge facilitates the application of sublexical letter-sound mappings to decode words. With reading experience, word identification becomes a key lexical skill to support decoding. In transparent orthographies, however, letter knowledge might be an…

This dissertation explores the role of memory in language processing, and specifically how interference during lexical encoding can result in downstream interference during retrieval. The dissertation merges insights from both the sentence processing literature as well as the study of memory in non-sentential contexts and focuses on two factors…

Background: Word-to-text integration (WTI) can be challenging for second-language (L2) learners, although it can positively contribute to reading comprehension. The present study examined the role of WTI, after controlling for decoding, vocabulary and morphosyntactic awareness, in predicting English as an L2 reading comprehension development in…

While the theoretical models of morphological processing in Roman alphabets indicate prelexical activation, a model established in Korean suggests postlexical activation. To extend the model of Korean morphological processing, this study examined within-scriptal (Hangul-Hangul prime-target pairs) and cross-scriptal (Hanja-Hangul prime-target…

Arguably, the most contentious debate in the field of eye movement control in reading has centered on whether words are lexically processed serially or in parallel during reading. Chinese is character-based and unspaced, meaning the issue of how lexical processing is operationalized across potentially ambiguous, multicharacter strings is not…

Purpose: The present meta-analysis investigated the efficacy of anomia treatment in bilingual and multilingual persons with aphasia (BPWAs) by assessing the magnitudes of six anomia treatment outcomes. Three of the treatment outcomes pertained to the "trained language": improvement of trained words (treatment effect [TE]),…

The fluency of second language (L2) speech can be influenced by L2 proficiency, but also by differences in the efficiency of cognitive operations and personal speaking styles. The nature of cognitive fluency is still, however, little understood. Therefore, we studied the cognitive fluency of Finnish advanced students of English (N = 64) to…