As Chinese is not alphabetic and the input of Chinese characters into computer is still a difficult and unsolved problem, voice retrieval of information becomes apparently an important application area of mobile information retrieval (IR). It is intuitive to think that users would speak more words and require less time when issuing queries vocally to an IR system than forming queries in writing...

Cognitive neuropsychological studies of patients with acquired reading and writing disorders in alphabetic languages have influenced our understanding of how mappings between orthography and phonology are learned, represented, and processed by the brain. This methodology has been extended to understanding reading and writing in Chinese during the past decade, leading to new insights about langu...

Language development entails four fundamental and interactive abilities: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Over the past four decades, a large body of evidence has indicated that reading acquisition is strongly associated with a child's listening skills, particularly the child's sensitivity to phonological structures of spoken language. Furthermore, it has been hypothesized that the cl...

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...

This study investigated cross-language and writing system relationship in biliteracy acquisition of children learning to read two different writing systems-Chinese and English. Forty-six Mandarin-speaking children were tested for their first language (Chinese-L1) and second language (English-L2) reading skills. Comparable experiments in Chinese and English were designed focusing on two reading ...

A number of recent studies consistently show an area, known as the visual word form area (VWFA), in the left fusiform gyrus that is selectively responsive for visual words in alphabetic scripts as well as in logographic scripts, such as Chinese characters. However, given the large difference between Chinese characters and alphabetic scripts in terms of their orthographic rules, it is not clear ...

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...

Keyword search in speech requires retrieval systems to know the pronunciation of keywords. Many languages of the world are either largely alphabetic or have pronouncing dictionaries so that deducing pronunciations at run-time is manageable. There are many under-resourced languages, though, with writing systems where only some of the vowels are represented in the orthography (i.e., “abjads”). Th...