Infants are thought to be sensitive to frequency in the input as a cue for phonological development. However, linguistic biases such as phonological markedness have been argued to play a role too. Since frequency and markedness are correlated, the two assertions could be different interpretations of data that confound frequency and markedness. In…

Children with Attention-Deficiency/Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) often have co-existing learning disabilities and developmental weaknesses or delays in some areas including speech (Rief, 2005). Seeing that phonological disorders include articulation errors and other forms of speech disorders, studies pertaining to children with ADHD symptoms who…

Toddlers' discrimination of native phonemic contrasts is generally unproblematic. Yet using those native contrasts in word learning and word recognition can be more challenging. In this article, we investigate perceptual versus phonological explanations for asymmetrical patterns found in early word recognition. We systematically investigated the…

The present study investigates how age, phonological saliency, and deviance size affect the presence of mismatch negativity (MMN) and positive mismatch response (P-MMR). This work measured the auditory mismatch responses to Mandarin lexical tones, initial consonants, and vowels in 4- to 6-year-old preschoolers using the multiple-deviant oddball…

The results of four experiments refute the idea that children rely heavily on their knowledge of letter names when they begin trying to spell words. Although kindergartners and first graders sometimes spelled the nonword /var/ as "vr," they were less likely to spell the nonword /ves/ as "vs" or the nonword /tib/ as…

The development of reading depends on phonological awareness across all languages so far studied. Languages vary in the consistency with which phonology is represented in orthography. This results in developmental differences in the grain size of lexical representations and accompanying differences in developmental reading strategies and the…

This study examined effects of familiarity with a speech target on coarticulation magnitude in 30 young children and 10 adults. Children exhibited a greater effect of a following vowel on the preceding fricative than did adults. Nonmeaningful production items exhibited greater effects of the vowel on the preceding fricative than did meaningful…

This study examined whether toddlers build a repertoire of words as integral sequences of gestures and then differentiate these sequences into their gestural and segmental components. Results demonstrate clear differences in duration and coordination of gestures between children and adults and a shift toward the patterns of adult speakers during…

Evaluates competing proposals for the underspecification of phonological representations against the facts of phonemic acquisition. Results indicate that context-sensitive radical underspecification provides a plausible account of each developmental stage and the transition between stages with minimal grammar change. (36 references) (Author/CK)

Evaluates the principle of laryngeal-supralaryngeal cyclicity by manipulating the domain cycle and phase relationship of the cycle as independent variables and by monitoring longitudinally the order of emergent phonemic distinctions in the sound systems of seven children with phonological delays as the dependent variable. Findings are discussed.…

Twenty-eight toddlers with slow expressive language development were compared to normally speaking age-mates and found to show delayed rather than deviant development in the average level of complexity of their syllable structures, the number of different consonant phonemes produced, and the percentage of consonants correctly produced in…

These are findings of theoretical interest from: (i) follow-up of a case study of a precocious reader; and (ii) normally developing readers who served as comparison groups. The precocious reader was first reported when 2-3 years of age (Cognition 74 (2000) 177). From 3 to 7 years of age her precocious reading development continued, her word…

The phonemic awareness of 100 children in the second semester of kindergarten was evaluated through analysis of their invented spelling patterns. A taxonomy of 10 invented spelling patterns and 21 response types was developed. A developmental ordering of spelling patterns is proposed and relationships among phonological awareness, spelling, and…