The focus of the study is two-fold: 1) to determine how much phonemic material must be considered in predicting nominal gender in Spanish; 2) to determine if gender assignment can be considered an analogical process. A database of Spanish nouns extracted from a frequency dictionary serves as the database for the present study, while the phonemic make up and syllable structure of the penultimate...

This study examined the cerebral functional lateralization, from a phonological perspective, in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and typically developing children (TDC). With near infrared spectroscopy, we measured auditory evoked-responses in the temporal areas to phonemic and prosodic contrasts in word contexts. The results of TDC showed stronger left-dominant and right-dominant r...

An ubiquitous phenomenon in psychology is the ‘repetition effect’: a repeated stimulus is perceived better on the second occurrence than on the first. Yet, what counts as a repetition? When a spoken word is repeated, is it the acoustic shape or the linguistic type that matters? In the present study, we contrasted the contribution of acoustic and phonological features by using participants with ...

Two groups of children with developmental dyslexia were treated over a period of four months. Fourteen children received visual hemisphere-specific stimulation (VHSS) and 11 children were treated with a customary, reading-focused training programme (RT). Reading performance was investigated before and after treatment, as were spelling abilities, phonemic awareness and verbal memory. Improvement...

Does alphabetic-phonetic writing start with the proper name and how does the name affect reading and writing skills? Sixty 4- to 5(1/2)-year-old children from middle SES families with Dutch as their first language wrote their proper name and named letters. For each child we created unique sets of words with and without the child's first letter of the name to test spelling skills and phonemic se...

When speakers of Puerto Rican Spanish (PRS) produce phonemic coda taps, Spanish-speakers of other dialects often perceive these as laterals. We observed production of phonemic coda laterals and taps by a male PRS speaker in real-time MRI. Temporal and spatial characteristics of tongue tip movements during coda liquid production are inconsistent with accounts positing a categorical change from r...