In the 1970’s the approach of Natural Phonology focused on the observation that phonetically motivated (“natural”) processes are common in the phonologies of the world’s languages, while phonetically unmotivated (“unnatural”) ones are uncommon (cf. Stampe 1969, Vennemann 1974, Hooper 1976, Donegan and Stampe 1979; for reactions at the time see, for example, Hellberg 1978 and Anderson 1981). Muc...

Infants' phonological acquisition during the first 18 months of life has been some 30 years. Current research themes include statistical learning mechanisms, early lexical development, and models of phonetic category perception. So far, linguistic theories have hardly been taken into account. These theories are based upon the assumption that there is a common core of innate phonological knowled...

Conflict of interest: non-existent The phonological disorder is one of the speech sound disorders with a higher incidence in children1,4-9 and can negatively impact the health and quality of life of children. Because of it early diagnosis and intervention become essential to prevent further improvement of the disorder and the appearance of other alterations1. Children with phonological disorder...

One account of how pronunciation variants of spoken words (center-> "senner" or "sennah") are recognized is that sublexical processes use information about variation in the same phonological environments to recover the intended segments (Gaskell & Marslen-Wilson, 1998). The present study tests the limits of this phonological inference account by examining how listeners process for the first tim...

Previous research using event-related brain potentials (ERPs) suggested that phonological processing in visual word recognition occurs rather late, typically after semantic or syntactic processing. Here, we show that phonological activation in visual word recognition can be observed much earlier. Using a lexical decision task, we show that ERPs to pseudohomophones (PsHs) (e.g., ROZE) differed f...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the phonological development of toddlers from 2 to 3 years of age with complete unilateral cleft lip and palate (UCLP) treated during the first year of life with and without infant orthopedics (IO). DESIGN In a randomized clinical trial (Dutchcleft), two groups of children were followed up: one treated with IO (IO group) and another that did not receive IO (non-IO gro...

BACKGROUND In alphabetic languages, emerging evidence from behavioral and neuroimaging studies shows the rapid and automatic activation of phonological information in visual word recognition. In the mapping from orthography to phonology, unlike most alphabetic languages in which there is a natural correspondence between the visual and phonological forms, in logographic Chinese, the mapping betw...

Speech perception phenomena have been drawn on by researchers in the area of phonological theory to elucidate synchronic phonological processes such as neutralization (Steriade 1995, 1997), consonant/consonant metathesis (Hume 1998, 2001), place assimilation (Jun 1995), etc. It has also been found that listeners' perceptual abilities are influenced by their native language experience (e.g. Hume...

This paper describes a strategy for the extension of the phonological lexicon in order that nonstandard forms which arise in fast speech may be processed by a speech recognition system. By way of illustration, an outline of the phonological processing of standard wordforms by the phonological parser (PhoPa) is given and then the extension procedure which is based on this phonological parser is ...

Phonological descriptions of Western and Eastern Lawa, two related but mutually unintelligible languages (Nahhas, 2006), differ greatly. Western Lawa is relatively well described (c.f. Mitani, 1972, Schlatter, 1976, Ratanakul and Daoratanahongse, 1985). For Eastern Lawa, three partially conflicting phonological descriptions exist, with consonantal inventories ranging from 19 (Mitani, 1978) to 3...