Aims: To investigate the developmental trajectory of the rate and perceptual assessment of oral diadochokinesis (DDK) in typically developing children compared with adults. Also to examine the characteristics of DDK productions in children with speech sound disorders (SSD) and the relationship between DDK production and percentage of consonants…

This study aims to describe the relationships between child-internal and child-external factors and the consonant accuracy of bilingual children. More specifically, the study looks at internal factors: expressive and receptive vocabulary, and external factors: language exposure and language status, of a group of 4-year-old bilingual Arabic-French…

In this article, the author presents a teaching prompt--Write-it-Out--to instruct readers who seemingly guess at words with no or limited use of grapheme-phonemic correspondences to recontextualize word-solving into writing. Through the nature of this prompt, slowing down the pace of solving words on the run with writing also reciprocally builds…

This paper describes name-related literacy practices in a multilingual preschool classroom and their implications for emergent biliteracy. We draw on a translingual framework to understand children's name-writing activities and how bilingual children's early literacy interacts with, and at times disrupts, the written conventions of named…

Purpose: One of the strategies that can be used to support speech communication in deaf children is cued speech, a visual code in which manual gestures are used as additional phonological information to supplement the acoustic and labial speech information. Cued speech has been shown to improve speech perception and phonological skills. This…

Rhythmic structure in speech is characterized by sequences of stressed and unstressed syllables. A large body of literature suggests that speakers of English attempt to achieve rhythmic harmony by evenly distributing stressed syllables throughout prosodic phrases. The question remains as to how speakers plan metrical structure during speech…

Background & Aim: To assess consonant proficiency and velopharyngeal function in 10-year-old children born with unilateral cleft lip and palate (UCLP) within the Scandcleft project. Methods & Procedures: Three parallel group, randomized, clinical trials were undertaken as an international multicentre study by nine cleft teams in five…

As an overwhelming amount of research has demonstrated that educator preparation programs do not adequately prepare instructors to teach pronunciation, this study aims to help teachers of foreign languages to implement and improve pronunciation instruction (PI) in their classroom by adapting PACE (Presentation, Attention, Co-construction, and…

Purpose: The /[voiced alveolar approximant]/ productions of young children acquiring American English are highly variable and often inaccurate, with [w] as the most common substitution error. One acoustic indicator of the goodness of children's /[voiced alveolar approximant]/ productions is the difference between the frequency of the second…

The English writing system is often seen as having rules that govern the choice between alternative pronunciations of letters but as having many exceptions to the rules. One postulated rule, the V¯|CV rule, is that a vowel is pronounced as long rather than short when it is followed by a single consonant letter plus a vowel letter. We find, in an…

Phonological duration differences in quantity languages can be problematic for second language learners whose native language does not use duration contrastively. Recent studies have found improvement in the processing of non-native vowel duration contrasts with the use of listen-and-repeat training, and the current study explores the efficacy of…

The study aimed to analyse the production of plosive sounds by trilingual speakers of L1 Polish - L2 English - L3 Norwegian. The main objective was to trace any changes in the VOT production of fortis and lenis stops in all three languages (Polish, English and Norwegian) produced by novice L3 learners with a focus on possible cross-linguistic…

In this experiment, we examined whether beginning readers benefit more from grapheme-phoneme decoding (GPD) than from whole-syllable decoding (WSD) instruction in learning to read and write words. Sixty Brazilian Portuguese-speaking first graders (M age = 6 years 1 month) who knew letter names but could not read or write words were randomly…

Children's ability to correctly name letters is a key predictor of later reading abilities and skills, but research on letter naming from Scandinavian orthographies is scarce. The aim of this study is to explore how child- and letter-related factors (i.e., gender, child name, phonemic awareness, letter position in the alphabet and frequency, and…

Language learning is a complex issue of interest to linguists, computer scientists, and psychologists alike. While the different fields approach these questions at different levels of granularity, findings in one field profoundly affect how the others proceed. My dissertation examines the perceptual and linguistic generalizations regarding the…