This review describes a computational approach for modeling the development of speech motor control in infants. We address the development of two levels of control: articulation of individual speech sounds (defined here as phonemes, syllables, or words for which there is an optimized motor program) and production of sound sequences such as phrases…

Recent findings have revealed that very preterm neonates already show the typical brain responses to place of articulation changes in stop consonants, but data on their sensitivity to other types of phonetic changes remain scarce. Here, we examined the impact of 7-8 weeks of extra-uterine life on the automatic processing of syllables in 20 healthy…

We examined whether akshara knowledge, phonological awareness, phonological memory, and RAN predict variability in word and nonword reading skills in Grade 1-4 children (N = 200) learning to read Sinhala. Hierarchical regression analyses showed that akshara knowledge had the strongest unique association with both word and nonword reading accuracy…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to investigate developmental and noise-induced changes in central auditory processing indexed by event-related potentials in typically developing children. Method: P1, N2, and N4 responses as well as mismatch negativities (MMNs) were recorded for standard syllables and consonants, frequency, intensity, vowel, and…

Purpose: The present study investigated phonological encoding skills in children who stutter (CWS) and those who do not (CNS). Participants were 9 CWS (M=11.8 years, SD=1.5) and 9 age and sex matched CNS (M=11.8 years, SD=1.5). Method: Participants monitored target phonemes located at syllable onsets and offsets of bisyllabic words. Performance in…

In the current ERP study, an active oddball task was carried out, testing pure tones and auditory, visual and audiovisual syllables. For pure tones, an MMN, an N2b, and a P3 were found, confirming traditional findings. Auditory syllables evoked an N2 and a P3. We found that the amplitude of the P3 depended on the distance between standard and…

Effects of lexical and sublexical variables on visual word recognition are often treated as homogeneous across participants and stable over time. In this study, we examine the modulation of frequency, length, syllable and bigram frequency, orthographic neighborhood, and graphophonemic consistency effects by (a) individual differences, and (b) item…

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…

Sensorimotor processing in children and higher-cognitive processing in adults could determine how non-native phonemes are acquired. This study investigates how age-of-acquisition (AOA) and proficiency-level (PL) predict native-like perception of statistically dissociated L2 categories, i.e., within-category and between-category. In a similarity…

This article reports on an investigation of graphophonological processes in deaf readers of French over a 1-year period. Deaf readers are known to have a phonological deficit compared to hearing peers, and conclusions from studies on this question are often conflicting. Among the different types of phonological processing, we can identify…

Neurolinguistic and psycholinguistic studies suggest that grammatical (gender) and phonological information are retrieved independently and that gender can be accessed before phonological information. This study investigated the relative time courses of gender and phonological encoding using topographic evoked potentials mapping methods.…

This dissertation measured the acoustic properties of the English fricatives and affricates produced by native and Chinese L2 speakers of English to identify the phonetic basis and sources of a foreign accent and to explore the mechanism involved in L2 speech production and L2 phonological acquisition at the segmental level. Based on a Network…

Recent research has shown that adults can implicitly learn artificial phonotactics constraints from experience producing syllables that contain those constraints, and that this learning is reflected in their speech errors. However, second-order constraints in which the placement of a consonant depends on another characteristic of the syllable…

Research indicates a strong relationship between phonological awareness and reading success. Phonemic intervention programs clearly show the benefits of explicitly teaching phonological awareness skills. Phonological awareness skills vary in nature and degree of difficulty and appear to follow a developmental progression. This study examined a…

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…