The authors examined the role of intermediate, sublexical representations in spoken word perception. In particular, they tested whether flaps, which are neutralized allophones of intervocalic /t/s and /d/s, map onto their underlying phonemic counterparts. In 2 shadowing tasks, the authors found that flaps primed their carefully articulated…

The influence of orthography on children's on-line auditory word recognition was studied from the end of Grade 2 to the end of Grade 4, by examining the orthographic consistency effect [Ziegler, J. C., & Ferrand, L. (1998). Orthography shapes the perception of speech: The consistency effect in auditory recognition. "Psychonomic Bulletin & Review",…

This study examined the status of current reading, spelling, and phonological processing skills of 28 university students who reported a history of reading acquisition problems. The results indicated that 21 of these participants were currently able to comprehend text at a level expected for university students, although only 8 at a rate…

This article focuses on a concept that has rarely been studied in beginning reading research--a child's concept of word in text. Recent examinations of this phenomenon suggest that a child's ability to match spoken words to written words while reading--a concept of word in text--plays a pivotal role in early reading development. In this article,…

An alternating treatments design was used to compare the effects of two response modes on acquisition and retention rates of letter naming fluency performance (LNF) by six kindergarten English Language Learners (ELLs) performing below the average letter naming level and slope of other ELL classmates. With equal amounts of practice opportunities,…

Two experiments were conducted to ascertain whether the reader uses phonological cues, semantic cues, or both types of cues in identifying letter combinations. Sixty introductory psychology students participated in the first experiment, which tested the differential effects of phonological and semantic cues on the speed with which a verbal unit…

Phonics is the application of the science of speech sounds to reading and spelling, and it is concerned with the sounds of the spoken language (phonemes) and their graphic forms (graphemes). In the English language there is not a 1-to-1 grapheme-phoneme relationship; 43 basic speech sounds are recorded by using 26 letters. Other irregularities…

Explores early stages of reading acquisition, specifically the relation of phoneme blending and letter recoding to individual differences in word decoding. Examines the ability to recode letters, blend phonemes and decode words in Dutch children. Indicates that results are consistent with the self teaching hypothesis and other theories that imply…

Argues that phonemes play a central role in speech recognition. Presents simulations showing how the recognition of nonsense syllables can be very well predicted from the recognition of their component phonemes. Suggests that a model in which syllables are factored into their phonemes can account for the results of multidimensional phonetic…

Describes how changes in speaking rate and changes in lexical context have qualitatively different effects on category goodness judgments. A key underlying assumption is that there are prelexical representations that are essentially phonemic in nature. (Author/VWL)

The Shortlist model is presented, which incorporates the desirable properties of earlier models of back-propagation networks with recurrent connections that successfully model many aspects of human spoken word recognition. The new model is entirely bottom-up and can readily perform simulations with vocabularies of tens of thousands of words. (DR)

Discusses a word-onset gating technique to investigate the role of prosody in word recognition. Subjects were asked to identify words based on onsets followed by information about full word prosody. Results showed that words were correctly recognized with significantly less segmental onset information when word prosody was available. (Author/VWL)

Finds (1) positive phonemic-masking effects occurred for dominant homophones; (2) null phonemic-masking effects occurred for subordinate homophones; and (3) subordinate homophones were much more likely to be falsely identified as their dominant mate. Suggests the source of these null phonemic-masking is itself a phonology effect. Concludes…