A study was conducted to investigate the ability of children to determine meanings of derived words that have undergone a pronunciation shift while retaining a close orthographic relationship to their base words. A researcher-designed test was constructed using derived words that had their base word included in a "core list" of words at or below…

This report is one of a regular series about the status and progress of studies on the nature of speech, instrumentation for its investigation, and practical applications. The 11 papers discuss the dissociation of spectral and temporal cues to the voicing distinction in initial stopped consonants; perceptual integration and selective attention in…

A test was constructed to measure a person's ability to produce Spanish sounds which are considered difficult but which must be mastered for fluency in Spanish. The test was used with learners from kindergarten to college. It was consensually validated by a panel of bilingual specialists after analyzing it according to contrastive analysis…

Weakening and deletion of syllable-final and word-final phonemes, a phenomenon prevalant in Puerto Rican Spanish, was studied. Two of these phonemes, /s#/ and /n#/ were examined for their capacity as plural markers. Data were collected during a one-year ethnographically-oriented study of a single block in the Puerto Rican community in north…

Patterns which partly resemble the proposed "fronting,""voicing," and "stopping" tendencies exist to a statistically significant degree in David Olmsted's large sample of child speech. Instead of the "voicing" pattern that has been suggested, however, voiced stops seem to be favored word-initially, but voiced fricatives are favored word-finally.…

Speech discrimination by 12 children aged about 1 1/2 to 3 1/2 years was tested, using the discrimination learning procedure of Shvachkin's 1948 Russian study. Recent work on the acquisition of syntax and semantics shows an ordered acquisition for linguistic items; this pilot study was to test whether the ability to discriminate between consonants…

The stress patterns of Aragonese are examined within the framework of generative phonology, based on data taken from the traditional works of Haensch, Badia Margarit, and Alvar Lopez. Stress placement is shown to be regular. Two sets of rules which account for the data are compared. In the preferred solution, a penultimate stress rule, a rule of…

The purpose of the study contained in this report is to provide research and design data for the Southwest Regional Laboratory (SWRL) Mod 2 Reading Program, a four-year program (K-3) for teaching reading skills to primary-grade children. The report is divided into two volumes. Volume one describes sequencing and methodology, and the specific rule…

This paper deals with the assessment of children's acquisition of phonological competence. Phonological competence refers to the idealized speaker/hearer's ability to understand the linguistic structure underlying phonetic input/output. Under the Jakobsonian assumption that the learning of phonological opposition follows a regular sequence, an…

Presented is a report on the work of Cybernetics Research Institute (CRI) investigators on the development of deaf-blind communication and control systems (DEBLICOM). Described in Part One is one embodiment of DEBLICOM designed and built by CRI engineers. Reported in Part Two are experimental procedures and human factors considerations of…

Fricatives and affricates in different word positions and initial fricative clusters were elicited from three linguistically deviant children (ages five years, two months to seven years) and one normal child (age two years, nine months) by means of pictures depicting familiar objects. Data from two of the older children and the normal child are…

This paper describes a large computer-coded conversational speech data base and results of testing phonological rules on that data base. The study shows that frequency of rule application depends not only on phonological environments, but also on frequency of occurrence of specific words. That is, some rules are highly word-dependent, others are…

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 reports on a study of two girls about one year of age, part of a longitudinal study of the development of consonants by children learning their first language. Data are compared with a third child whose progress has been previously documented. Phone classes were grouped and phone trees analyzed for each child. A high level of…

The material in this report represents some of the earliest results of field research in the languages of Nepal by the Summer Institute of Linguistics, Inc. Some of the results presented here are tentative hypotheses, subject to revision in the light of continuing research. Part I, the present volume, presents phonological data in terms of…