The natural phonology theory, related to European structuralism, makes two fundamental assumptions: (1) phonemes are mental images of the sounds of language, and (2) phonological processes represent subconscious mental substitutions of one sound or class of sounds for another that are the natural response to the relative difficulties of sound…

The paper considers the difference between articulatory and phonological disorders. The deviant production of a phoneme may be articulatory or phonological in nature. The nature of the phonemic deviation must be determined before appropriate therapeutic intervention may be devised. Recorded responses of 53 children (ages 4 years, six months to six…

The irregularity of English spelling rules, dialect differences, and an inability to identify sound segments within a single syllable are three important reasons teachers and students have difficulty teaching and learning reading using phonics. Within the same language, phonics rules may need to be adapted to fit the dialect of the student or of…

It is generally agreed among French linguists that the word has no phonetic or phonological status in French. This position reflects mostly pedagogical considerations and preoccupation with surface phonetic facts and demarcative signals. Investigation of processes of a more abstract nature reveals, however, that a certain number of rules…

A study reports a set of labelling criteria which have been developed to label prosodic events in clear, continuous speech, and proposes a scheme whereby this information can be transcribed in a machine readable format. A prosody in a syllabic domain which is synchronized with a phonemic segmentation was annotated. A procedural definition of…

Reading researchers and theorists are sharply divided as to how meaning is obtained from the printed word. Three current explanations are that (1) meaning is accessed directly, without any intermediate processes; (2) meaning is accessed only through an intermediate phonemic stage; and (3) both direct access and phonemic mediation can occur. To…

Several experiments were conducted to show that knowledge of the spelling of words is involved in making decisions about how they are pronounced. The experiments used a lexical decision task with only spoken words and nonwords. Subjects in each experiment heard an uninterrupted list of spoken words and nonwords at a rate of about one item every…

Native English speakers performed a phoneme-monitoring task to assess whether ambiguous words (homographs) require extra processing capacity under two conditions: no prior context and prior context provided by disambiguating subject-noun and verb combinations. Phoneme detection latencies were reliably longer for homographs than for control words…

The term generative phonolgy refers to statements, rules or axioms which can produce all but only those well-formed utterances of a language. The goal of this theory is to make precise and explicit the ability of native speakers to produce utterances of a particular language. In generative phonology, the level of the phoneme is redefined to match…

Instruction for beginning readers is thought to be needed on several fronts, including phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, reading comprehension, and vocabulary. The National Reading Panel reviewed the findings of many experiments to determine whether there was sufficient scientific evidence to indicate the effectiveness of these forms of…

Since the phonic abilities of high school shorthand teachers and students affect the students' mastery of dictation and transcription, a study was conducted (1) to develop a dictation/transcription learning cycle depicting the phoneme/grapheme correspondence in the two processes; (2) to determine the phonetic patterns of correspondence of the…

The traditional theory of Chinese writing is that it is divorced from the language because as a non-alphabetic system, it cannot represent real speech. Chinese writing, however, is a functional linguistic system in its own right. Writing does not need to be totally dependent on speech, but can be related either to the phonological or the semantic…

This study investigated the relationship between perception and production in children's phonological learning to determine whether perceptual confusions could account for the patterns of substitution and deletion found in 2-year-olds' speech. A total of 14 children were presented pairs of toy stimuli, with each pair composed of a familiar item…

Blending means smoothing together subword segments to try to identify a spoken word. Research suggests that beginning readers need to blend to combine the phonemes they "sound out" into a recognizable approximation of a known word. Popular wisdom presumes blending is easiest when the segments of words are whispered and when syllables are…

A discussion of the nature and process of phonological changes taking places in languages looks specifically at the merging of allophones and the reorganization of phonemes in response to pressures within the phonological system. The hypotheses of economy and reorganization are used to analyze the process of change within a phonological system.…