This Commentary supports Gathercole's (2006) proposal on a double deficit in children with specific language impairment (SLI). The author suggests that these children have a limited phonological storage combined with a particular problem of processing novel speech stimuli. According to Gathercole, there are three areas of skill contributing to…

The accuracy of deaf adults' letter report was greater for real and nonsense words than for pseudowords, and error analysis shows deaf adults tend to produce orthographically regular responses. These findings indicate clearly the use of orthographic structure in word recognition. (MSE)

Presents study exploring oral reading errors of normally developing readers to determine any developmental differences in learning phoneme-grapheme units; to discover if the grapheme representations of some phonemes are more difficult to read than others; and to replicate results reported by Fowler, et. al. Findings show most oral reading errors…

Basic manual transcription procedure is outlined and three methods of generating transcripts are considered separately: completely manual preparation, manual and computer combined, and online processing and monitoring by computer. Factors such as initial equipment investment, person hours, cost of copying and modifying transcripts, and reduction…

Environmentally contaminated speech errors (irrelevant words or phrases derived from the speaker's environment and erroneously incorporated into speech) are hypothesized to occur at a high level of speech processing, but with a relatively late insertion point. The data indicate that speech production processes are not independent of other…

To examine possible explanations of reported inaccuracies of children with specific language impairment (SLI) on nonword repetition, study compared repetitions of 54 SLI children and peers for number and type of error, latency, and duration of response. Found no evidence of differences between groups in auditory discrimination or response…

Presents longitudinal case studies of the successive phonological acquisition of two Cantonese-English bilingual children, aged 2;3 to 3;1 years and 2;9 to 3; and 5 years. Children were assessed at four-week intervals. Phoneme-acquisition data and phonological process data revealed that both children had separate phonological systems for the two…

Good and poor readers, 15- and 16-year-olds and adult literacy students, were compared in their ability to produce graphemic representations for four specific phonemes. Good readers were significantly better than poor readers at representing the critical phonemes, but intentional ambiguity had a similar effect on all. (MSE)

Discusses two monolingual Spanish-speaking patients who were able to read words but showed great difficulty reading nonwords, a pattern of behavior known as phonological dyslexia. Contradicts the hypothesis that lexical reading is not an option for Spanish readers, because Spanish orthography is highly irregular, and supports the view that…

Reports a study that examined sixth- and 10th-grade students' ability to generate orthographic and phonetic derivatives for three predominant vowel-alternation patterns characteristic of internal derivational morphology. Results support the hypothesis that a productive knowledge of these patterns in orthography precedes a productive knowledge of…

Reports a study that compared the spelling performance of a 17-year-old developmental dysgraphic of normal intelligence to that of an acquired dysgraphic. Findings indicate that both make phonologically valid errors and spell regular words better than irregular words. These performances reflect a phonological routine corresponding to that used by…

Focuses on the importance of phonology in establishing orthographic representations. In normal readers, phonological and orthographic representations of words are so closely connected that they are usually coactivated, whereas in dyslexics, this connection is less strong, so that orthographic representations interfere less with phonemic…

Investigates the relative influences of medium and context variables by comparing seven- and eight-year-old children's spoken and written explanations in varying contexts: a story task, a question task, a sentence completion task, and a whole sentence production task. Findings reveal the significant influence of context as compared to medium on…