The ability to compute non-adjacent regularities is key in the acquisition of a new language. In the domain of phonology/phonotactics, sensitivity to non-adjacent regularities between consonants has been found to appear between 7 and 10 months. The present study focuses on the emergence of a posterior-anterior (PA) bias, a regularity involving two…

Recently, several studies have argued that infants capitalize on the statistical properties of natural languages to acquire the linguistic structure of their native language, but the kinds of constraints which apply to statistical computations remain largely unknown. Here we explored French-learning infants' perceptual preference for…

One hypothesis raised by Newport and Aslin to explain how speakers learn dependencies between nonadjacent phonemes is that speakers track bigram probabilities between two segments that are adjacent to each other within a tier of their own. The hypothesis predicts that a dependency between segments separated from each other at the tier level cannot…

The present article investigates how phonotactic rules constrain oral reading in the Russian language. The pronunciation of letters in Russian is regular and consistent, but it is subject to substantial phonotactic influence: the position of a phoneme and its phonological context within a word can alter its pronunciation. In Part 1 of the article,…

To date, the nature of the phonological deficit in developmental dyslexia is still debated. We concur with possible impairments in the representations of the universal phonological constraints that universally govern how phonemes co-occur as a source of this deficit. We were interested in whether-and how-dyslexic children have sensitivity to…

For the past several decades, researchers have been investigating the stages infants go through on their way to acquiring their native language. Research into the question of the order in which, and time when, various facets of phonology are acquired has resulted in a basic timeline of development. Exploration of a second question, namely what…

While the vast majority of linguistic processes apply locally, consonant harmony appears to be an exception. In this phonological process, consonants share the same value of a phonological feature, such as secondary place of articulation. In sibilant harmony, [s] and [esh] ("sh") alternate such that if a word contains the sound [esh], all [s]…

Listeners of various languages tend to perceive an illusory vowel inside consonant clusters that are illegal in their native language. Here, we test whether this phenomenon arises after phoneme categorization or rather interacts with it. We assess the perception of illegal consonant clusters in native speakers of Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese,…

In a noisy environment, visual perception of articulatory movements improves natural speech intelligibility. Parallel to phonemic processing based on auditory signal, visemic processing constitutes a counterpart based on "visemes", the distinctive visual units of speech. Aiming at investigating the neural substrates of visemic processing in a…

We examined the effects of letter-transposition in Hebrew in three masked-priming experiments. Hebrew, like English has an alphabetic orthography where sequential and contiguous letter strings represent phonemes. However, being a Semitic language it has a non-concatenated morphology that is based on root derivations. Experiment 1 showed that…

The issue of how information flows within the lexical system in written naming was investigated in five experiments. In Experiment 1, participants named target pictures that were accompanied by context pictures having phonologically and orthographically related or unrelated names (e.g., a picture of a "ball" superimposed on a picture of…

The processing of abbreviations in reading was examined with an eye movement experiment. Abbreviations were of 2 distinct types: acronyms (abbreviations that can be read with the normal grapheme-phoneme correspondence [GPC] rules, such as NASA) and initialisms (abbreviations in which the GPCs are letter names, such as NCAA). Parafoveal and foveal…

The aim of this study was to determine if two dimensions of song, the phonological part of lyrics and the melodic part of tunes, are processed in an independent or integrated way. In a series of five experiments, musically untrained participants classified bi-syllabic nonwords sung on two-tone melodic intervals. Their response had to be based on…

In the present article, we report 3 experiments using the odd-man-out variant of the implicit priming paradigm, aimed at determining the role played by phonological information during the handwriting process. Participants were asked to write a small set of words learned in response to prompts. Within each block, response words could share initial…

Is the bilingual language production system a dynamic system that can operate in different language activation states? Three experiments investigated to what extent cross-language phonological co-activation effects in language production are sensitive to the composition of the stimulus list. L1 Dutch-L2 English bilinguals decided whether or not a…