In two experiments, I tested for the presence of conditioned seeing as a measureable behavior, which was measured by participants' accuracy in drawing a stimulus, and how this behavior was related to the demonstration of the naming capability. In Experiment 1, participants demonstrated a correlation between drawing responses and speaker…

Individuals with acquired phonological dyslexia experience difficulty associating written letters with their corresponding sounds, especially in pseudowords. Several studies have attempted to improve reading in this population by training letter-to-sound correspondence, general phonological skills, or a combination of these approaches; however,…

For the past several decades, researchers have been investigating the stages infants go through on their way to acquiring their native language. Research into the question of the order in which, and time when, various facets of phonology are acquired has resulted in a basic timeline of development. Exploration of a second question, namely what…

Debuccalization is a weakening phenomenon whereby various consonants reduce to laryngeals. Examples include Spanish s-aspiration (s becomes h word-finally) and English t-glottalization (t becomes glottal stop syllable-finally). Previous analyses of debuccalization view it as a lenition process that deletes or manipulates formal phonological…

This dissertation takes up the issue of transparency and opacity in vowel harmony--that is, when a segment is unable to undergo a harmony process, will it be skipped over by harmony (transparent) or will it prevent harmony from propagating further (opaque)? I argue that the choice between transparency and opacity is best understood as a…

Recent research has shown that adults can implicitly learn artificial phonotactics constraints from experience producing syllables that contain those constraints, and that this learning is reflected in their speech errors. However, second-order constraints in which the placement of a consonant depends on another characteristic of the syllable…