Harmony is a process by which some property of a trigger segment spreads onto one or more undergoer segments. In some languages, any segment that bears a harmonizing property will trigger harmony, while in others some segments bearing that property will trigger harmony while others will not. This paper examines such cases in the nasal vowelconsonant harmony systems of several Malayo-Polynesian....

This paper presents a phonetic conversion system with phonological knowledge for Galician. The system allows us to evaluate several phonological processes, like syllabification or phonological derivation, as well as to transcript lexicons with phonetic annotation of different linguistic varieties automatically. The system consists of the following modules: (i) phonological conversion, which gen...

We investigate phonological encoding during unscripted sentence production, focusing on the effect of phonological overlap on phonological encoding. Previous work on this question has almost exclusively employed isolated word production or highly scripted multi-word production. These studies have led to conflicting results: some studies found that phonological overlap between two words facilita...

Recent work recognizes that lexical category can be relevant for phonology, because phonological processes and phonotactics are sometimes category-sensitive (Smith 1997, 2001; Myers 2000; Bobaljik 2008; see also Cohen 1964; Chomsky & Halle 1968; Postal 1968; Kenstowicz & Kisseberth 1977). Moreover, there are strong cross-linguistic tendencies concerning the nature of phonological differences be...

Infants exhibit a remarkable capacity for speech sound discrimination early in life, including sensitivity to the dimensions that define phonemic categories of human languages (e.g. Eimas, 1974; Eimas & Miller, 1980; Eimas, Siqueland, Jusczyk, & Vigorito, 1971; Miller & Eimas, 1983). Over the first year of life, infants’ perceptual sensitivities are refined to reflect the phonological structure...

BACKGROUND Phonological awareness and literacy. AIM to verify the influence of phonological awareness therapy in the literacy process. METHOD 46 children were submitted to an assessment involving the reading and writing of words and non-words and of phonological awareness. The experimental group was submitted to therapy. RESULTS Therapy had a positive influence in the performance of the c...

About 25 years ago, some ofmy colleagues posed the question that was, in their view, basic to an understanding of the reading process and the ills that so frequently attend it: what must the would-be reader know that mastery of speech will not have taught him? Drawing on a combination of common sense, old knowledge about language, and new knowledge about speech, they arrived at the hypothesis t...

Bilingual children face a variety of challenges that their monolingual peers do not. For instance, switching between languages requires the phonological translation of proper names, a skill that requires mapping the phonemic units of one language onto the phonemic units of the other. Proficiency of phonological awareness has been linked to reading success, but little information is available ab...

The present study investigated whether phonological awareness training is an effective intervention to significantly improve reading in German dyslexic third and fourth graders with a phonological awareness deficit, and whether these children can equally benefit from a phonology-based reading training or a visually-based reading training. German speaking dyslexic elementary school children (n=3...