Two member onset consonant clusters with /s/ as the first member (#sC onsets) behave differently from other double onset consonant clusters in English. Phonological explanations of children's consonant cluster production have been posited to predict children's speech acquisition. The aim of this study was to consider the role of the Sonority…

The purpose of the current study is to document phonological change from a multidimensional perspective for a 3-year-old boy with phonological disorder by comparing three measures: (1) accuracy of consonant productions, (2) dynamic assessment, and (3) acoustic analysis. The methods included collecting a sample of the targets /s, [image omitted],…

Symbolic rule-based approaches have been a preferred way to study language and cognition. Dissatisfaction with rule-based approaches in the 1980s lead to alternative approaches to study language, the most notable being the dynamic approaches to language processing. Dynamic approaches provide a significant alternative by not being rule-based and…

Several recent experiments indicate that, when learning words, children are not as sensitive to phonemic differences (e.g., /d/ vs. /t/) as they are in discrimination tasks [Pater, J., Stager, C. L., & Werker, J. F. (2004). "The perceptual acquisition of phonological contrasts." "Language," 80, 384-402; Stager, C. L., & Werker, J. F. (1997).…

Consonant mastery is one of the most widely used metrics of typical phonological acquisition and of phonological disorder. Two fundamental methodological questions concerning research on consonant acquisition are (1) how to elicit a representative sample of productions and (2) how to analyse this sample once it has been collected. This paper…

Cued American English (CAE) is a visual variety of English derived from a mode of communication called Cued Speech (CS). CS, or cueing, is a system of communication for use with the deaf, which consists of hand shapes, hand placements, and mouth shapes that signify the phonemic information conventionally conveyed through speech in spoken…

A sample of 500 misspelled words was drawn from compositions written by students in third, fourth, and fifth grade. Errors were analyzed to indicate the type of misspellings that occur in writing connected discourse, to identify phonemes that cause particular spelling problems, and to identify typical error patterns. Results indicated that most of…

Neighborhood size and neighborhood frequency were orthogonally varied in two experiments on Italian nonwords. In Experiment 1, an inhibitory effect of neighborhood frequency on visual lexical decision was found: The presence of one high-frequency neighbor increased response latencies and error rates to nonwords. By contrast, no effect of…

Many factors that contribute towards the perception of second language (L2) sounds and the subsequent establishment of L2 phonetic categories have been the focus of past research. However, learning a third language, unlike SLA, may be influenced by additional factors attributed to the presence of two language systems in a bilingual instead of one…

Phonological awareness (PA) is the ability to analyze spoken language into its component sounds and to manipulate these smaller units. Literature review related to PA shows that a variety of factor groups play a role in PA in Mandarin such as linguistic experience (spoken language, alphabetic literacy, and second language learning), item type,…

Much of the research that contributes to understanding how bilingual children become literate is not able to isolate the contribution of bilingualism to the discussion of literacy acquisition for these children. This article begins by identifying three areas of research that are relevant to examining literacy acquisition in bilinguals, explaining…

Despite the prevalence of bilingualism, language acquisition research has focused on monolingual infants. Monolinguals cannot learn minimally different words (e.g., "bih" and "dih") in a laboratory task until 17 months of age ( J. F. Werker, C. T. Fennell, K. M. Corcoran, & C. L. Stager, 2002). This study was extended to 14- to 20-month-old…

A practical orthography is presented for Kuuk Thaayorre, which is spoken by over 300 Aborigines in Australia. The phonemes in Thaayorre and the way they are symbolized in normal writing practice are presented. Frequent occurrence of six conventional digraphs for some Thaayorre consonants has given rise to complementary orthography as an initial…

A high-amplitude sucking procedure, with synthesized female speech, was used to ascertain the effects of fundamental frequency, amplitude, and duration on discrimination of polysyllabic sequences. Results suggest that the exaggerated suprasegmentals of infant-directed speech may function as a perceptual catalyst, focusing the infant's attention on…

Two nonword spelling and two orthographic awareness experiments examined production and awareness of sound-spelling relationships. Results of the nonword spelling experiments suggest people use phoneme-grapheme sized relationships when spelling nonwords. Orthographic awareness experiments suggest, under some circumstances, people can use larger…