Theoretical phonology has at its heart the assumption of two separate levels of speech sound representations: one less abstract, phonetic, 'surface' level, and one more abstract, phonological, 'underlying' level. Descriptions of phonological neutralisation processes such as German final devoicing hinge on the mappings between these two levels, as…

Previous studies showed that word learning is affected by children's existing knowledge. For instance, knowledge of semantic category aids word learning, whereas a dense phonological neighbourhood impedes learning of similar-sounding words. Here, we examined to what extent children associate similar-sounding words (e.g., rat and cat) with objects…

Purpose: Children with speech sound disorders (SSDs) often struggle with forming early representations for phonemes and words, which could impact their speech production as well as their lexical access. This difficulty may limit their ability to accurately identify nonexemplar productions of words, such as developmental misarticulations produced…

Current understanding of word-finding (WF) difficulties in children and their underlying language processing deficit is poor. Authors have proposed that different underlying deficits may result in different profiles. The current study aimed to better understand WF difficulties by identifying difficult tasks for children with WF difficulties and by…

Skilled reading is thought to rely on well-specified lexical representations that compete during visual word recognition. The establishment of these lexical representations is assumed to be driven by phonology. To test the role of phonology, we examined the prime lexicality effect (PLE), the index of lexical competition in signing deaf (N = 28)…

Purpose: This study investigates whether crosslinguistic effects on auditory word recognition are modulated by the quality of the auditory signal (clear and noisy). Method: In an online experiment, a group of Spanish--English bilingual listeners performed an auditory lexical decision task, in their second language, English. Words and pseudowords…

Network analyses of the phonological mental lexicon show that words are clustered into communities and phonologically dissimilar words can be connected to each other through distant paths. Here we investigate whether behavioral traces of the large-scale structure of the phonological lexicon can be obtained. Participants listened to pairs of spoken…

We investigated whether native Finnish speakers can grasp the meaning of Russian onomatopoeic words without any prior knowledge of the Russian language. In Experiment 1, elicitation test, naïve listeners generated associations for the acoustic events depicted by onomatopoeic words they heard. A cluster analysis suggested presence of different…

Fluent word recognition is an essential component of skilled reading, yet most children with reading difficulty have impaired word recognition. We developed and evaluated a web app, WordDriver, delivered via teletherapy, which targets phonological recoding to support orthographic learning and efficient word recognition. Participants were five…

Reading can be regarded as a combination of lexical decoding and linguistic comprehension (Hoover and Gough in Read Writ Interdiscip J 2:127-160, 1990). In Chinese sentence reading, skilled readers' difficulties in phonological processing significantly enhance the 'wrap-up' effect (Li and Lin in J Deaf Stud Deaf Educ 25(4):505-516, 2020). To…

The study explored the role of verbal fluency in determining reading and comprehension skills in Bengali among 10-year old typically developing Bengali children. Robust correlations were found between semantic fluency and word reading (0.63) as well as semantic fluency and comprehension (0.70). Good correlation was found between letter fluency and…

While the theoretical models of morphological processing in Roman alphabets indicate prelexical activation, a model established in Korean suggests postlexical activation. To extend the model of Korean morphological processing, this study examined within-scriptal (Hangul-Hangul prime-target pairs) and cross-scriptal (Hanja-Hangul prime-target…

F0 contours convey multiple types of information, including lexical and post-lexical meanings, as well as affective and socio-indexical indicators. This dissertation investigates the interaction between lexical tone and sentence-level intonation in Thai, focusing on how sentence position influences the acoustic realization and perceptual…

A bilingual's language system is highly interactive. When hearing a second language (L2), bilinguals access native-language (L1) words that share sounds across languages. In the present study, we examine whether input modality and L2 proficiency moderate the extent to which bilinguals activate L1 phonotactic constraints (i.e., rules for combining…

Oral communication often takes place in noisy environments, which challenge spoken-word recognition. Previous research has suggested that the presence of background noise extends the number of candidate words competing with the target word for recognition and that this extension affects the time course and accuracy of spoken-word recognition. In…