The study investigates the relationship between lexical encoding and production in order to establish whether learners are able to produce a difficult contrast in words that they merged in their mental lexicon. Forty American English learners of Russian were tested on their production and lexical encoding of familiar and highly-frequent words with…

Phonotactic patterns are generalizations that govern the order of consonants and vowels, within words and syllables. Certain second-order phonotactic patterns--those that relate multiple sounds within a syllable, such as "if the vowel is [near-close near-front unrounded vowel], then [s] can only appear at the end of the…

Cross-situational word learning (XSWL) tasks present multiple words and candidate referents within a learning trial such that word-referent pairings can be inferred only across trials. Adults encode fine phonological detail when two words and candidate referents are presented in each learning trial (2 × 2 scenario; Escudero, Mulak, & Vlach,…

This study investigated whether the phonological representation of a word is modulated by its orthographic representation in case of a mismatch between the two representations. Such a mismatch is found in Persian, where short vowels are represented phonemically but not orthographically. Persian adult literates, Persian adult illiterates, and…

The Possible Word Constraint, or PWC, is a speech segmentation principle prohibiting to postulate word boundaries if a remaining segment contains only consonants. The PWC was initially formulated for English where all words contain a vowel and claimed to hold universally after being confirmed for various other languages. However, it is crucial to…

Background: In 2012 the Intelligibility in Context Scale (ICS) was published as a parent-report screening assessment that considers parents' perceptions of their children's functional intelligibility with a range of communication partners that differ in levels of authority and familiarity in real-life situations. To date, the ICS has been…

Adults can rapidly learn artificial phonotactic constraints such as /"f"/ "occurs only at the beginning of syllables" by producing syllables that contain those constraints. This implicit learning is then reflected in their speech errors. However, second-order constraints in which the placement of a phoneme depends on another…

Four eye movement experiments investigated whether readers use parafoveal input to gain information about the phonological or orthographic forms of consonants, vowels, and tones in word recognition when reading Thai silently. Target words were presented in sentences preceded by parafoveal previews in which consonant, vowel, or tone information was…

This dissertation addresses the extent to which linguistic behavior can be described in terms of the projection of patterns from existing lexical items, through an investigation of Korean reduplication. Korean has a productive pattern of reduplication in which a consonant is inserted in a vowel-initial base, illustrated by forms such as "alok"--"t…

Tested whether listeners' reaction times for monitoring a predetermined phoneme are influenced by phonetic constraints on ordering. Reaction times were significantly shorter for phoneme monitoring in monosyllable-bisyllable sequences than in bisyllable-monosyllable sequences; however, reaction times were not significantly different for high-low vs…

Reports two experiments which support the hypothesis that reaction time is faster to phonemes when the phonetic context matches the listener's expectation than when the vowel context is different. Reaction time to syllable targets is equal to phoneme, matched context targets. (PMJ)

This is a preliminary report on the testing of two hypotheses related to the acquisition of Spanish phonemes, namely that in the nasal series, production of the labial is acquired before the dental, followed by the velar; and that the liquid series, containing "l", "r", and trilled "r" (rr) will be the last class of sounds to be acquired. These…

This paper argues that Chomsky's and Halle's restriction on the features [+high, +low] are too severe; that this restriction is inconsistent with the generative treatment of affricates, laterally-released stops, and prenasalized stops; and that the restriction is inconsistent with the notion that linguistic descriptions are abstract theories about…

Investigates the acquisition of selected English short and long vowel spellings by German learners of English in order to answer the questions: who acquires the short and long vowel spellings (a,e,i), and when and what governs their order of acquisition? Statistical data is included. (Author/OD)

THIS PAPER PRESENTS FIRST A SUMMARY OF RESEARCH INVESTIGATING THE EXTENT TO WHICH THE KINDERGARTEN CHILD HAS ABSTRACTED IMPLICIT REGULARITIES IN THE FORMATION OF PLURALS IN ENGLISH. PRODUCTION AND RECOGNITION TASKS WERE USED. THE CHILDREN MADE MORE ERRORS WITH SYLLABLES REQUIRING THE ADDITION OR DELETION OF THE /IZ/ ALLOMORPH THAN WITH SYLLABLES…