This study describes the realization of onset and coda clusters in a 4-year old child acquiring American English, and with a higher than usual level of unintelligible speech. It reviews previous studies that have tested cluster realization against markedness and, in particular, the sonority hypothesis. This latter predicts steep rises in sonority…

Purpose: This study investigated the network of brain regions involved in overt production of vowels, monosyllables, and bisyllables to test hypotheses derived from the Directions Into Velocities of Articulators (DIVA) model of speech production (Guenther, Ghosh, & Tourville, 2006). The DIVA model predicts left lateralized activity in inferior…

This is a corpus-based investigation of "also" and "too" in 11 registers of Indian English. The corpus used for this study is a combination of a Corpus of Contemporary Indian English (CCIE), and certain sections of ICE-India. The study: (1) determines the proportions of "also" and "too" with respect to each…

Purpose: The effective use of visual cues to speech provides benefit for adults with normal hearing in noisy environments and for adults with hearing loss in everyday communication. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of a computer-based, auditory-visual vowel identification training program on sentence recognition under difficult…

This article discusses basic writing pedagogy at a two-year tribal college, an institution type that has not been visible in the basic writing literature to date. In many tribal college contexts, socioeconomic challenges, under-resourced K-12 schools, and linguistic diversity all contribute to high student placement rates into…

The primary aim of this dissertation was to investigate the relationship between speech perception and speech production difficulties among Japanese second language (L2) learners of English, in their learning complex syllable structures. Japanese L2 learners and American English controls were tested in a categorical ABX discrimination task of…

Function (i.e., grammatical) words very frequently lack word-level stress and display phonetic reduction relative to content (i.e., lexical) words. However, word-class (function vs . content) may not be the only factor that affects phonetic realization of function words; prosodic and syntactic context can also play a significant role in…

This article describes the use of African American English (AAE) in the written and oral language of African American adolescents who struggle with writing. Written and oral language samples of 22 African American 10th-grade students were transcribed, analyzed, and coded for AAE, grammatical errors, spelling errors, and punctuation errors. Four…

Two experiments investigated the mechanism by which listeners adjust their interpretation of accented speech that is similar to a regional dialect of American English. Only a subset of the vowels of English (the front vowels) were shifted during adaptation, which consisted of listening to a 20-min segment of the "Wizard of Oz." Compared…

Purpose: Research has established that African American (AA) children are lagging behind other children in their reading skills. A number of factors have been proposed to account for the literacy gap; however no single factor has entirely explained this disparity. This investigation examined the appropriateness of the Gray Oral Reading Test-Fourth…

Although it may seem contradictory, when Spaniards "greet" each other in passing they often employ formulas associated with farewells such as "adios" ("bye") or "hasta luego" ("see you later"). This common practice contrasts with other languages like American English in which speakers use greeting…

The phonetic context in which word-medial flaps occur (in contrast to [t[superscript h]]) in American English is explored. The analysis focuses on stress placement, following phone, and syllabification. In Experiment 1, subjects provided their preference for [t[superscript h]] or [flapped t] in bisyllabic nonce words. Consistent with previous…

Drawing on the body of North American literature related to English dialect-speaking Indigenous students schooled in majority group classrooms, this commentary paper explores two aspects of institutional racism at work in Saskatchewan schools: (a) the disproportionate representation of First Nations and Metis students in remedial language and…

This study examined whether children's use of subject relative clauses differs as a function of their English dialect (African American English, AAE vs. Southern White English, SWE vs. Mainstream American English, MAE) and clinical diagnosis (specific language impairment, SLI vs. typically developing, TD). The data were spontaneous language…

There have been a number of mechanisms proposed to account for recognition of phonological variation in spoken language. Five of these mechanisms were considered here, including underspecification, inference, feature parsing, tolerance, and a frequency-based representational account. A corpus analysis and five experiments using the nasal flap…