High frequency words, commonly referred to as sight words, are often a focus of emergent reading instruction. Instructional practices abound that require emergent readers to memorize the spelling and pronunciation of the words without drawing attention to grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) in the words. These approaches ignore a critical…

Teaching spelling is controversial because teaching approaches vary considerably in the contemporary classroom. Teachers may privilege visual over linguistic strategies, select words based around themes or let students choose spelling words, rather than focus on the explicit teaching of phono-morphological structures of words. A nine-week…

Most current theories of reading and dyslexia derive from a relatively narrow empirical base: research on English and a handful of other European alphabets. Furthermore, the two dominant theoretical frameworks for describing cross-script diversity--orthographic depth and psycholinguistic grain size theory--are also deeply entrenched in Anglophone…

Women are better than men at verbal memory tasks, such as remembering word lists. These tasks depend on declarative memory. The declarative/procedural model of language, which posits that the lexicon of stored words is part of declarative memory, while grammatical composition of complex forms depends on procedural memory, predicts a female…

The goal of the present study was to explore the pattern of lexical connections between translation equivalents represented in the cognitive system of an Arabic-Hebrew bilingual. To achieve this goal, repetition priming effects (reaction times (RTs) and accuracy measures) were compared between translation equivalents in the two forms of Arabic,…

The prevailing view of phonological development is that changes in pronunciation are driven by phonological changes. This view (it is argued here) derives from the particular form of the data that has most often been used in studies of phonological development, namely broad phonetic transcriptions. Transcribing an earlier pronunciation with one…

Problems emerging from previous analyses of epenthesis in Japanese verbal endings are discussed and a crucial relationship between epenthesis and assimilation is argued. The focus is on the occurrence of /i/-epenthesis with certain root-final consonants. The analysis, which incorporates the view that assimilation is accomplished by means of…

The aim of the present study was to determine whether processing of syntactic word information (lemma) is subserved by the same neural substrate as processing of conceptual or word form information (lexeme). We measured BOLD responses in 14 native speakers of German in three different decision tasks, each focussing specifically on one level of…

In this paper the morphological argument for the conditioning of Sanskrit aspiration and deaspiration is renewed in theoretically current terms, bringing forth new arguments and examining previously undiscussed major weaknesses in the purely phonological (autosegmental) argument. Relevant phonological, morphological, and lexical facts are…

An analysis of stress and intonation patterns in Swedish is presented in the context of lexical phonology. The theories of lexical, metrical, and autosegmental phonology are outlined, and a brief review of Swedish stress and tone patterns is presented. The nature of Swedish stress, the interaction of stress rules with length and morphology, the…

A discussion of the treatment of suffixes in Korean linguistic theory argues that, in view of recent clitic typology, Korean case markers and verbal suffixes are better analyzed in lexical rather than in syntactic terms. Evidence for this approach is found in phonological phenomena, morpheme and allomorph selection, and compounding. The most…

The transformation that language undergoes when it becomes speech is examined in English. Statistical analysis of a representative sample of natural, informal speech reveals a number of characteristics of dynamic speech that distinguish it from static (citation form or pre-dynamic) linguistic form. It appears that in running speech, vowels and…

Suggests that a new perspective is needed on the "great debate" in literacy instruction between whole language and phonics. Proposes an approach that integrates comprehension and decoding into a system designed around the principles of student-centered, authentic instruction in a socially engaging context. Considers the advantages of…

An investigation, analyzing the linking of skeleton and syntactical rules of Madurese, presents counterevidence to Marantz's claims about the nature of reduplication, and to Carrier-Duncan's claim that reduplication must precede all phonological rules. It is proposed that reduplication in Madurese is not affixation, as Marantz claims, and can be…

Human languages can incorporate signs without obvious physical relationship to their referents. The nature of the relationship between sign (i.e., word or sign) and referent in signed and spoken languages is discussed from cognitive and historical research perspectives, and observations are given on the biological bases of this phenomenon.…