Infants' abilities to discriminate native and non-native phonemes have been extensively investigated in monolingual learners, demonstrating a transition from language-general to language-specific sensitivities over the first year after birth. However, these studies have mostly been limited to the study of vowels and consonants in monolingual…

Phonological development was assessed in six alphabetic orthographies (English, French, Greek, Icelandic, Portuguese and Spanish) at the beginning and end of the first year of reading instruction. The aim was to explore contrasting theoretical views regarding: the question of the availability of phonology at the outset of learning to read (Study…

In Mandarin Chinese, speakers benefit from fore-knowledge of what the first syllable but not of what the first phonemic segment of a disyllabic word will be (Chen, Chen, & Dell, 2002), contrasting with findings in English, Dutch, and other Indo-European languages, and challenging the generality of current theories of word production. In this…

Two experiments used the head-mounted eye-tracking methodology to examine the time course of lexical activation in the face of a non-phonemic cue, talker variation. We found that lexical competition was attenuated by consistent talker differences between words that would otherwise be lexical competitors. In Experiment 1, some English cohort…

Three experiments addressed the hypothesis that production factors constrain phonotactic learning in adult English speakers, and that this constraint gives rise to a markedness effect on learning. In Experiment 1, an acoustic measure was used to assess consonant-consonant coarticulation in naturally produced nonwords, which were then used as…

Previous studies suggest that different neural and functional mechanisms are involved in the analysis of irregular ("caught") and regular ("filled") past tense forms in English. In particular, the comprehension and production of regular forms is argued to require processes of morpho-phonological assembly and disassembly, analysing these forms into…

Are speakers equipped with preferences concerning grammatical structures that are absent in their language? We examine this question by investigating the sensitivity of English speakers to the sonority of onset clusters. Linguistic research suggests that certain onset clusters are universally preferred (e.g., "bd" is greater than "lb"). We…

Examined the effects of phonological-skill training on consonantal-phoneme deletion and word-reading performance in early and middle adolescent Chinese readers who were literate in English. Found significant improvements in both activities for younger but not older participants, with follow-up analyses suggesting that language-proficiency…

Examined the relationship between phonological awareness and reading skills in eight-year olds from Britain, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Found that performance of Chinese children on phonological tests was not significantly related to their reading ability, in contrast to performance of English children, whose results continued to show a significant…

Groups of seven- to nine-year olds learning to read in English and German were given three types of reading tasks. Whereas reading time and error rates in numeral and number word reading were very similar across the two orthographies, the German children showed a big advantage in reading the nonsense words, suggesting adoption of different…