The six studies found concerning the effect of pure phonemic awareness training (without phonics) on reading comprehension gave a positive but modest overall effect size in favor of phonemic awareness training. Four studies had small samples, two showed no or very small effect sizes, and one inconsistent results. Three involved languages other than English. Such results do not support the popul...

Many people exposed to sinewave analogues of speech first report hearing them as electronic glissando and, later, when they switch into a 'speech mode', hearing them as syllables. This perceptual switch modifies their discrimination abilities, enhancing perception of differences that cross phonemic boundaries while diminishing perception of differences within phonemic categories. Using high-den...

BACKGROUND Aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage (aSAH) survivors commonly exhibit impairment on phonemic and semantic fluency tests; however, it is unclear which of the contributing cognitive processes are compromised in aSAH patients. One method of disentangling these processes is to compare initial word production, which is a rapid, semiautomatic, frontal-executive process, and late phase word ...

In a meta-analysis of 135 studies involving 6000 patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and 6057 healthy controls, we examined the relative degree of semantic and phonemic fluency impairment in AD patients. The effect size for semantic fluency (d=2.10: 95%CI 2.22-1.97) was significantly larger than for both phonemic fluency (d=1.46: 95%CI 1.56-1.36) and picture naming (d=1.54: 95%CI 1.66-1.40)....

Human speech consists of a variety of articulated sounds that vary dynamically in spectral composition. We investigated the neural activity associated with the perception of two types of speech segments: (a) the period of rapid spectral transition occurring at the beginning of a stop-consonant vowel (CV) syllable and (b) the subsequent spectral steady-state period occurring during the vowel seg...