Purpose: Chronic deep brain stimulation of the nucleus ventralis intermedius is an effective treatment for individuals with medication-resistant essential tremor. However, these individuals report that stimulation has a deleterious effect on their speech. The present study investigates one important factor leading to these effects: the…

Dyslexia in consistent orthographies like German is characterized by dysfluent reading, which is often assumed to result from failure to build up an orthographic lexicon and overreliance on decoding. However, earlier evidence indicates effects of lexical processing at least in some German dyslexic readers. We investigated variations in reading…

A major problem in second language acquisition (SLA) is the segmentation of fluent speech in the target language, i.e., detecting the boundaries of phonological constituents like words and phrases in the speech stream. To this end, among a variety of cues, people extensively use prosody and statistical regularities. We examined the role of pitch,…

Recent studies focused on the influence of orthographic processing on reading and spelling performance. It was found that orthographic processing is an independent predictor of reading and spelling performance in different languages and children of different ages. This study investigated sensitivity to orthographic regularities in German-speaking…

Facilitative effects of bilingualism on general aspects of third language (L3) proficiency have been demonstrated in numerous studies conducted in bilingual communities and classrooms around the world. When it comes to L3 phonology, however, empirical evidence has been scarce and inconclusive in respect to the question of whether and/or how…

Among the cognitive causes of dyslexia, phonological and magnocellular deficits have attracted a substantial amount of research. Their role and their exact impact on reading ability are still a matter of debate, partly also because large samples of dyslexics are hard to recruit. Here, we report a new technique to simulate dyslexic symptoms in…

Beginning readers in shallow orthographies acquire word reading skills more quickly than in deep orthographies like English. In addition to extending this evidence base by comparing reading acquisition in English with the more transparent German, we conducted a longitudinal study and investigated whether different early reading skills made…

Children develop linguistic competencies during interactions with more knowledgeable others. Consequently, one way to support this development is by enhancing the home literacy environment (HLE) in which children live. In this study a non-intensive intervention procedure was developed to improve HLE and linguistic competencies of 125 German…

An auditory lexical decision experiment was conducted to find out whether sound-to-spelling consistency has an impact on German spoken word processing, and whether such an impact is different at different stages of reading development. Four groups of readers (school children in the second, third and fifth grades, and university students)…

This article reports a lexical-decision experiment that was conducted to investigate the impact of word stress on visual word recognition in German. Reaction-time latencies and error rates of German readers on different levels of reading proficiency (i.e., third graders and fifth graders from primary school and university students) were compared…

Visual cues from the speaker's face, such as the discriminable mouth movements used to produce speech sounds, improve discrimination of these sounds by adults. The speaker's face, however, provides more information than just the mouth movements used to produce speech--it also provides a visual indexical cue of the identity of the speaker. The…

This article demonstrates the potential of sound iconicity for automatic text analysis. This study claims that--at least in poetic language--the ratio of plosive versus nasal sounds in a text predicts its emotional tone as it is perceived by readers; that is, poems that have a relatively high frequency of plosive sounds are more likely to express…

These days, illiteracy is still a major problem. There is empirical evidence that auditory phoneme discrimination is one of the factors contributing to written language acquisition. The current study investigated auditory phoneme discrimination in participants who did not acquire written language sufficiently. Auditory phoneme discrimination was…

This study investigates the role of perception and sensory motor learning on speech production in L2. Compared to natural language learning, acoustic input in formal adult instruction is deprived of multiple sensory motor cues and lacks the imitation component. Consequently, it is possible that inaccurate pronunciation results from training.…

Effects of syllable structure and of alphabetic reading skills on the development of phoneme awareness were investigated in a longitudinal study. Awareness of phonemes in syllable onsets and codas was examined in first graders speaking Czech (n = 45) and German (n = 33). Czech children showed higher awareness of phonemes in onsets than in codas,…