Children with autism spectrum disorders have been reported to be less influenced by a speaker's face during speech perception than those with typically development. To more closely examine these reported differences, a novel visual phonemic restoration paradigm was used to assess neural signatures (event-related potentials [ERPs]) of audiovisual…

Purpose: Effects related to literacy acquisition have been observed at different levels of speech processing. This study investigated the link between orthographic knowledge and children's perception and production of specific speech sounds. Method: Sixty Spanish-speaking second graders, differing in their phonological decoding skills, completed a…

This dissertation examines the development of the internal structure of the Korean syllable by adult Korean learners whose native language is English. Prior research has identified the prominence of the body constituent in Korean and the rime constituent in English. The current study focuses on the acquisition of the body unit by English speakers…

This study investigated how experience with a first language (L1) writing system affects the development of the second language (L2) word recognition subskills and how L2 linguistic knowledge constrains such L1 impacts. In this study, word recognition is conceptualized as a complex construct that entails multiple subskills necessary for…

Purpose: This study examined the performance of Gulf Arabic-speaking children with developmental language disorder (DLD) on a Gulf Arabic nonword repetition (GA-NWR) test and compared it to their age- and language-matched groups. We also investigated the role of syllable length, wordlikeness, and phonological complexity in light of NWR theories.…

This study aimed to explore the types of pronunciation errors that student interpreters make in pronouncing foreign Proper Nouns during English-Arabic and Arabic-English Liaison Interpreting, the pronunciation error strategies that students utilize when they encounter unfamiliar Proper Nouns in media discourse, and the factors that affect…

Speech errors typically respect the speaker's implicit knowledge of language-wide phonotactics (e.g., /t/ cannot be a syllable onset in the English language). Previous work demonstrated that adults can learn novel experimentally induced phonotactic constraints by producing syllable strings in which the allowable position of a phoneme depends on…

Pre-service special educators' Malay word structure knowledge was assessed through their analysis of words. A total of 69 participants analysed a vocabulary list based on a set of criteria formulated from the Malay language word structure. Results indicated that they were able to count syllables and phonemes, and identify types of affixations;…

Recent work has shown that children have detailed phonological representations of consonants at both word-initial and word-final edges. Nonetheless, it remains unclear whether onsets and codas are equally represented by young learners since word edges are isomorphic with syllable edges in this work. The current study sought to explore toddler's…

The present experiments investigated the flexibility of statistical word segmentation. There is ample evidence that infants can use statistical cues (e.g., syllable transitional probabilities) to segment fluent speech. However, it is unclear how effectively infants track these patterns in unfamiliar phonological systems. We examined whether…

This study investigated the role of syllable structure in L2 auditory word learning. Based on research on cross-linguistic variation of speech perception and lexical memory, it was hypothesized that Japanese L1 learners of English would learn English words with an open-syllable structure without consonant clusters better than words with a…

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…

The processes and the cues determining the orthographic structure of polysyllabic words remain far from clear. In the present study, we investigated the role of letter category (consonant vs. vowels) in the perceptual organization of letter strings. In the syllabic counting task, participants were presented with written words matched for the…

The role of letters and syllables in typical and dysfluent second grade reading in Finnish, a transparent orthography, was assessed by lexical decision and naming tasks. Typical readers did not show reliable word length effects in lexical decision, suggesting establishment of parallel letter processing. However, there were small effects of word…

Theories of language production generally describe the segment as the basic unit in phonological encoding (e.g., Dell, 1988; Levelt, Roelofs, & Meyer, 1999). However, there is also evidence that such a unit might be language specific. Chen, Chen, and Dell (2002), for instance, found no effect of single segments when using a preparation…