It had been hypothesized that, in developmental dyslexia (DD), an implicit learning deficit explains children's problems in encoding the phoneme-grapheme correspondences underlying the writing system and thus the development of spelling skills. The present study tested the efficacy of an intervention to facilitate implicit learning of…

Spoken English has a stress-alternating rhythm that is not marked in its orthography. In two experiments, the authors evaluated whether stylistic alterations to print that marked stress pulses fostered the rendering of rhythm (experiment 1) and stress (experiment 2) during silent reading. In experiment 1, silent readers rated the helpfulness of…

One of the aspects of L2 English phonology which poses a challenge for L2 learners is learning how to decode the language, especially as spoken by native speakers. This difficulty may be due to the way the native speakers speak by 'draw[ing] [the sounds] together' (Clarey & Dixson, 1963), which results in realization of consonants and vowels…

Teaching pitch patterns of English as part of one of the elements of intonation has considerably been undervalued in Turkish teacher education contexts despite its significance in communication (Roach, 2001; Scherer, 2003; Maastricht et al., 2016) hence less research was conducted on this subject (Wennerstrom, 2001; Pickering, 2002; Demirezen,…

The current study examined in depth the effects of suprasegmental-based instruction on the global (comprehensibility) and suprasegmental (word stress, rhythm, and intonation) development of Japanese learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). Students in the experimental group (n = 10) received a total of three hours of instruction over six…

Many children experience recurrent acute otitis media (RAOM) in early childhood. In a previous study, 2-year-old children with RAOM were shown to have immature neural patterns for speech sound discrimination. The present study further investigated the consonant inventories of these same children using natural speech samples. The results showed…

In this dissertation we examine the effects of pronunciation instruction on the perception of a novel L2 contrast. The novel contrast in this case is the glottal fricative which results in Spanish from the suppression buccal gestures of /s/ in the word-medial coda position. This process which occurs in Spanish, but not English is known as…

Two experiments tested the common assumption that knowing the letter names helps children learn basic letter-sound (grapheme-phoneme) relation because most names contain the relevant sounds. In Experiment 1 (n=45), children in an experimental group learned English letter names for letter-like symbols. Some of these names contained the…

This study reports two different experiments, as a part of a longitudinal study, that evaluated a cognitive intervention (PREP: PASS Reading Enhancement Program) to enhance early phonological processing skills, such as odd-word-out, segmenting, and blending, to kindergarten children at-risk for reading difficulties, in order to support the…